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

[Ruth Frasur]

Is this the one that we've committed to funding?

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 4:59 PM, Kathy Lussier <klussier at masslnc.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>


-- 
Ruth Frasur
Director of the Historic(ally Awesome) Hagerstown - Jefferson Township
Library
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