Re: [CODE4LIB] Question re: ranking and FRBR
On 4/12/06, K.G. Schneider [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Do users actually determine relevance or do they have faith in Google to provide the best results on the first results page? I'd say people use a click and try n times, before refine search until relevance is fulfilled technique. But again, this is *totally* dependant on what they're searching for; known or unknown ; - books by Frank Herbert (specific enough to get some results) - Jungs philosophy in fiction (general enough to cause bleeds) - good SciFi (general enough to cause bleeding) - oil crisis metaphors (specific and general at the same time) All of the above can lead to Dune by Frank Herbert. What is it's relevance to the above searches? It's a book by Herbert, it certainly contains Jungs philosophy, it's a good SciFi book, and has indeed the metaphors as part of its concept. And to top it all, it's still a popular book. So I could say The Dosadi Experiment and all the same is true, except the popularity. Who is to say that former is preferred over the latter? Google will give us the former, never the latter. For libraries, this is an interesting problem to solve, because popularity, at least in my view, is mostly a misnomer in searching for information. Popularity in Google is measured by people actually putting in the links, which means they point to something *because* there is something interesting that way. In the library catalogs there is no such thing. We've got an experiment running here which uses tags to do this last bit for us; people and librarians alike can tag books which will boost their ratings. An anonymous tag denotes popularity (unless stated otherwise), while a reference librarian boosts importance. Another fields I'm digging into is using search term logs to do some of this as well, generating heat for items ... close to popular, but can be very time-based (unlike links which stays around) if you don't feed the flame, it eventually will die out (or in this case, repurposed). Anyways, just a few thoughts and ideas. Alex -- Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know. - Frank Herbert __ http://shelter.nu/ __
Re: [CODE4LIB] Question re: ranking and FRBR
On Apr 11, 2006, at 4:11 PM, Colleen Whitney wrote: Jonathan Rochkind wrote: not the right approach. And yet...I wish I could explain why it seems as though the clustering can tell us something. Well, what is it you think the clustering can tell you something _about_? This is an interesting topic to me. I'm not sure the clustering can tell you anything about relevance to the user. I'm not seeing it. I mean, the number of items that are members of a FRBR work set really just indicates how many 'versions' (to be imprecise) of that work exist. But the number of 'versions' of a work that exist doesn't really predict how likely that work (or any of it's versions) is to be of interest to a user, does it? But maybe you're thinking of something I'm missing, I'm curious what you're thinking about. Yes, that's exactly what I'm stuck on. If more important or more popular works tend to have more manifestations, then there might be some signal as to probability of relevance in there. Which could be factored in (in some *small* way). But I'm not sure whether/how one would test that if. At the moment you have me convinced that it's a red herring. Perhaps there is something useful about grouping and highlighting works that have a large number of manifestations. My gut tells me that this would be more useful for a general audience than for specialized researchers. But you don't necessarily have to factor this into your default search relevance algorithm to expose it. Just speculating, but could one use the term classics to describe works with an exceeding large number of manifestations? Maybe this could be a useful post-search sort option. Or maybe you can define a high-manifestation threshold for your collection... if the user's search term matches any of these items, they are highlighted on the search results page in a separate bucket. Perhaps some people would appreciate such a filtering service. This may also apply for other specialized search needs. Rather than complicate (dilute?) your relevance algorithm by adding in factors of relevance only to a particular audience, why not develop targeted discovery services that complement the search results? Tito Sierra
Re: [CODE4LIB] Question re: ranking and FRBR
Right. The observation had more to do with how to order the items within a workset. The visitor was suggesting that a combination of popularity and currency ought to be considered for determining display. So between titles, you could show those titles that were more widely held first. Then within titles, you could show the most recent edition of the title at the top -- independent of the number of holdings associated with that particular edition. In answer to a question from yesterday, I'd wager (since we are doing armchair usability) that factoring in the number of manifestations of an item *would* make a difference. You'd probably have to do it at query time, but for the concerns I've heard about catalog records changing, conditional results for date sets seems valuable. Karen G. Schneider [EMAIL PROTECTED]
