Building user research interest profiles through a MeSH indexer.

In the information portal environment, user profiles helps librarians to better understand users' needs and build individualized services. We have used a locally developed UMLS-based MeSH indexer to process and extract MeSH concept terms from the contents of individuals' usage files on our library's portal system (MyWelch). The algorithm was also developed to refine these extracted terms and assign weights to individual terms. This process yielded a weighted MeSH term set for each individual user that can be considered to define the individual user's areas of research interest profile.