This report concerns a pilot study of patterns of access to scientific documents made available on the internet, in particular, the World-Wide Web. Its goal is to suggest that the behavior of internet users can be subject to scientific analysis, and further, that the tools of statistical mechanics may be of some value in this analysis.
One case studied is a document written according to the traditional model of the scientific article, but made available on the World-Wide Web. The other case is a document written in an intrinsically net-oriented model, and also available on the web. The statistics of access to these documents are rather different. While the first document appears to relax to equilibrium, the second document appears to be in a (self-organized) critical state.
Learning Change 