An Application of data mining for a library management system

Abstract

Data mining has become an emerging concept in today’s world. With the development of the technology in every field, a large amount of data can be collected and stored very easily. The challenge is to analyse these data from traditional analysisng techniques. The concept of data mining; which enables users to analyze data and draw conclusions through clearly defined procedures comes into play as a solution for this matter. The purpose of this research is to test the adequacy of data mining techniques to improve the library usage in Sri Lankan State Universities. A data warehouse was designed and implemented using the most important variables in the raw dataset. After cleaning and preprocessing of data, association rule mining and clustering were basically used in the data analysis phase. Interesting rules were identified and the said results were used in the next stage of the study. A Book Recommendation System was implemented in Java based on the results obtained in the previous stage. The system enables users to select library materials according to their prior borrowing patterns. My SQL, R and Java were basically used in the analysis. This research will be beneficial to enrich the library usage in state universities in Sri Lanka as well as the researchers those who are interested in Data Mining.