Searching and Browsing Digital Library Catalogues: A Combined Log Analysis for The European Library

In this paper we present the results of a project named ASIt (\emph{Atlante Sintattico d'Italia}, Syntactic Atlas of Italy), which provides linguists with a crucial test bed for formal hypotheses concerning human language. In particular, ASIt aims to capture cross-linguistic variants of grammatical structures within a sample of about 200 Italian Dialects. Since dialects are rarely recognized as official languages, first of all linguists need a dedicated information management system providing the unambiguous identification of each dialect on the basis of geographical, administrative and geo-linguistic parameters. Secondly, the information access system has been designed in order to allow users to search the occurrences of a specific grammatical structure (e.g. a relative clause or a particular word order) rather than a specific word. Thirdly, since ASIt has been specifically geared to the needs of linguists, user-friendly graphical interfaces have therefore been created to give easy access to language resources and to make the building of the language resources easier and distributed.