There has been a considerable investment of time, money and effort in recent years in the creation of bibliographic records of books. The results are clearly visible. We now have…
Abstract
There has been a considerable investment of time, money and effort in recent years in the creation of bibliographic records of books. The results are clearly visible. We now have AACR2, MARC records and a whole range of library networks—whether OCLC, RLIN et al in the States, or BLCMP, SWALCAP et al in Britain. We have a new edition of the Dewey Classification Scheme and a new edition of the Bliss Classification scheme. Yet despite all this effort, the databases created, whether an individual library's catalogue or the full set of MARC records on BLAISE, are of strictly limited value.
Bethan Ruddock and Dick Hartley
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how UK academic libraries choose metasearch systems; the choice processes they use; the main influences on their choices; and whether…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how UK academic libraries choose metasearch systems; the choice processes they use; the main influences on their choices; and whether these choice processes could be made easier.
Design/methodology/approach
The project used a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research methods, consisting of a literature review, two semi‐structured interviews, and an electronic questionnaire, distributed to systems librarians in UK university libraries.
Findings
It was found that many processes are repeated across libraries. It was also found that a prior/existing relationship with vendors has a strong influence on how libraries chose metasearch systems.
Originality/value
There has been no prior research explicitly investigating how a range‐of‐libraries chose metasearch systems. The results could be of value to libraries that are choosing a metasearch system, or other systems such as library management systems. It could also be of value to anyone interested in general choice procedures in libraries.
Details
Keywords
A recent Ariadne article on review service resource evaluation by Anagnostelis et al. (1997) ended with a reference to the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) and added…
Abstract
A recent Ariadne article on review service resource evaluation by Anagnostelis et al. (1997) ended with a reference to the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) and added that while PICS controls neither the publication nor the distribution of information, it offers ‘individuals and organisations the option of filtering out or filtering in selected views of networked information.’ There then followed a reference to the Centre for Information Quality Management (CIQM) and its proposal to use PICS filtering in order to allow users to set constraints on the minimum quality of resources retrieved (Armstrong 1997). This article seeks to amplify this basic idea.
Experimental evidence suggests that enhancing the subject content of OPAC records can improve retrieval performance. This is based on the use of natural language index terms…
Abstract
Experimental evidence suggests that enhancing the subject content of OPAC records can improve retrieval performance. This is based on the use of natural language index terms derived from the table of contents and back‐of‐the‐book index of documents. The research reported here investigates the alternative approach of translating these natural language terms into controlled vocabulary. Subject queries were collected by interview at the catalogue, and indexing of the queries demonstrated the impressive ability of PRECIS, and to a lesser extent LCSH, to represent users' information needs. DDC performed poorly in this respect. The assumption was made that an index language adequately specific to represent users' queries should be adequate to represent document contents. Searches were carried out on three test databases, and both natural language and PRECIS enhancement of MARC records increased the number of relevant documents found, with PRECIS showing the better performance. However, with weak stemming the advantage of PRECIS was lost. Consideration must also be given to the potential advantages of controlled vocabulary, over and above basic retrieval performance measures.
Clive Bingley, Sarah Lawson, Edwin Fleming and Kate Hills
AS FAIRLY WARNED to you earlier this year would transpire, what you are now reading is the 100th issue of NEW LIBRARY WORLD, a span of issues which has encompassed some 8½ years…
Abstract
AS FAIRLY WARNED to you earlier this year would transpire, what you are now reading is the 100th issue of NEW LIBRARY WORLD, a span of issues which has encompassed some 8½ years, several million words, a sizeable copse of trees to produce the paper on which those issues have been printed.