  The social sciences are a broad research field with a lot of sub- and related
disciplines. Accordingly, user interests in a digital library for the social
sciences are manifold. In this study we analyzed nine years log data of a
social science digital library to get an overview of the fields, categories,
topics and detailed information needs users are interested in. Based on the log
data we have built interactive visualizations which give an overview and
concurrently let us look at the detailed interests of users. The underlying log
data and the created visualizations are then used to analyze user interests at
different hierarchical levels and on a temporal view. The results show that
there are topical interests of the users in specific fields and topics of the
social sciences but at the same time there exists a diversity of different
information needs. Based on these findings we analyze in detail the gap between
the indexing language of the system used to annotate documents and the language
users apply to articulate their information needs.
