Most people think of a library as the little brick building in the heart of their community or the big brick building in the center of a campus. These notions greatly oversimplify the world of libraries, however. Most large commercial organizations have dedicated in-house library operations, as do schools, non-governmental organizations, as well as local, state, and federal governments. With the increasing use of the Internet and the World Wide Web, digital libraries have burgeoned, and these serve a huge variety of different user audiences. With this expanded view of libraries, two key insights arise. First, libraries are typically embedded within larger institutions. Corporate libraries serve their corporations, academic libraries serve their universities, and public libraries serve taxpaying communities who elect overseeing representatives. Second, libraries play a pivotal role within their institutions as repositories and providers of information resources. In the provider role, libraries represent in microcosm the intellectual and learning activities of the people who comprise the institution. This fact provides the basis for the strategic importance of library data mining: By ascertaining what users are seeking, bibliomining can reveal insights that have meaning in the context of the library’s host institution. Use of data mining to examine library data might be aptly termed bibliomining. With widespread adoption of computerized catalogs and search facilities over the past quarter century, library and information scientists have often used bibliometric methods (e.g., the discovery of patterns in authorship and citation within a field) to explore patterns in bibliographic information. During the same period, various researchers have developed and tested data mining techniques—advanced statistical and visualization methods to locate non-trivial patterns in large data sets. Bibliomining refers to the use of these bibliometric and data mining techniques to explore the enormous quantities of data generated by the typical automated library.
Analysis of Medical Opinions about the Nonrealization of Autopsies in a Mexican Hospital Using Association Rules and Bayesian Networks