[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Seeking development partners for search project

[Kathy Lussier]

Hi all,

A few months ago, MassLNC put out a call for development partners to 
help fund a project that would add an activity metric for Evergreen's 
relevance ranking. We temporarily put this project on the back burner 
while we focused on some other development projects, but this is 
something we would love to see implemented in Evergreen sometime soon.

Popularity is something that Amazon and Google use with great success 
when retrieving search results, and I think it would work well with 
Evergreen too. Consider the following scenario:

Let's say you have a patron looking for a book on General Patton that 
they just heard about on the radio. If they were to do a search for 
"george patton" in Amazon, the New York Times bestseller "Killing 
Patton" appears high in search results because Amazon has data saying it 
is a top seller and incorporates this information in its relevance 
ranking algorithm.

On the other hand, when I do the same search in the C/W MARS catalog, 
"Killing Patton" does not appear on the first page of results, despite 
the fact that this title is number 35 on the consortium's list of most 
requested titles at this time. The reason this happens is because the 
factors that influence Evergreen's relevance ranking are all related to 
the words found in the bib record. The words in the bib record are 
important, of course, but they don't always tell the entire story. Our 
hope is that an activity metric will provide that extra bit of 
information to search and help titles like "Killing Patton" float to the 
top of search results lists at times when a lot of users are looking for 
those titles.

Holds and circulation activity, item ownership counts, and other item 
attributes, such as copy location or circ modifiers, can be used to 
define popularity. For example, you could say titles with a certain 
number of holds or circulations over time could be identified as more 
active for the purposes of relevance ranking, but you could also say 
titles in a hot titles copy location or a reserves copy location (in 
academic libraries), should also be identified as more active.

We have a proposal from Equinox to do the work, but we do need help in 
funding the project. If you have any interest in helping us move this 
project forward, feel free to contact me directly and I can forward 
along more details about the project.

Thank you!
Kathy


-- 
Kathy Lussier
Project Coordinator
Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative
(508) 343-0128
klussier at masslnc.org
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier