Search results

This research aimed to explore whether subject facets would increase patron use of subject headings in a faceted (Yufind) versus a non‐faceted (Orbis) catalog interface at Yale University.

Two rounds of think aloud protocol testing were done with students to measure the acceptance and use of subject heading facets. After a faceted and non‐faceted interface were implemented, side‐by‐side, log file analysis was employed to measure and compare use of subject headings in both interfaces.

Initial usability testing showed that patrons would try facets, but had some problems effectively using them. In production from January to May 2011, at least one facet was used in 25.4 percent of Yufind searches, and subject facets were used in 5.1 percent of searches, while in Orbis subject headings were used in 6.4 percent of searches. Facets were used less than subject heading links in records in either interface.

The findings are important as libraries spend significant staff time adding subject headings to records, and their use by patrons is declining. As measured in two production systems running on exactly the same catalog records, subject heading facets did not successfully increase use of subject headings. Without further refinements, faceted display may not be a successful strategy to increase patron use of subject headings.

A comparison of patron generated subject heading use in two concurrently running interfaces, one faceted and one not, has not been done before.

In recent years, aceted search has been a well-accepted approach for many academic libraries across the United States. This chapter is based on the author’s dissertation and work of many years on faceted library catalogs. Not to hope to be exhaustive, the author’s aim is to provide sufficient depth and breadth to offer a useful resource to researchers, librarians, and practitioners about faceted search used in library catalogs.

The chapter reviews different aspects of faceted search used in academic libraries, from the theory, the history, to the implementation. It starts with the history of online public access catalogs (OPACs) and how people search with OPACs. Then it introduces the classic facet theory and its relationship with faceted search. At last, various academic research projects on faceted search, especially faceted library catalogs, are briefly reviewed. These projects include both implementation studies and the evaluation studies.

The results indicate that most searchers were able to understand the concept of facets naturally and easily. Compared to text searches, however, faceted searches were complementary and supplemental, and used only by a small group of searchers.

The author hopes that the facet feature has not only been cosmetic but the answer to the call for the next generation catalog for academic libraries. The results of this research are intended to inform librarians and library information technology (IT) staff to improve the effectiveness of the catalogs to help people find information they need more efficiently.

The purpose of this paper is to extract appropriate terms to summarize the current results in terms of the contents of textual facets. Faceted search on XML data helps users find necessary information from XML data by giving attribute–content pairs (called facet-value pair) about the current search results. However, if most of the contents of a facet have longer texts in average (such facets are called textual facets), it is not easy to overview the current results.

The proposed approach is based upon subsumption relationships of terms among the contents of a facet. The subsumption relationship can be extracted using co-occurrences of terms among a number of documents (in this paper, a content of a facet is considered as a document). Subsumption relationships compose hierarchies, and the authors utilize the hierarchies to extract facet-values from textual facets. In the faceted search context, users have ambiguous search demands, they expect broader terms. Thus, we extract high-level terms in the hierarchies as facet-values.

The main findings of this paper are the extracted terms improve users’ search experiences, especially in cases when the search demands are ambiguous.

An originality of this paper is the way to utilize the textual contents of XML data for improving users’ search experiences on faceted search. The other originality is how to design the tasks to evaluate exploratory search like faceted search.

XML has become a standard data format for many applications and efficient retrieval methods are required. Typically, there are roughly two kinds of retrieval methods, namely path‐based method (e.g. XPath and XQuery) and keyword search, but these methods do not work when users do not have any concrete information need. To expand feasibility of XML data retrieval is an important task and this is the purpose of this paper.

The paper's strategy is to apply faceted navigation for XML data. Faceted navigation is an exploratory search which enables the exploration of data making use of attributes, called facets. General faceted navigation methods are applied for attributed objects but XML data have no criteria because XML nodes are objects and facets. Thus, the paper's approach is to construct a framework to enable faceted navigation over XML data. It first extracts objects based on occurrence of nodes and facets. Then it constructs a faceted navigation interface for extracted objects and facets.

The framework achieves semi‐automatic construction of faceted navigation interface from an XML database. In the experiments, the show feasibility of the framework is shown by three faceted navigation interfaces using existing real XML data. On the other hand, the user study shows the retrieval method helps users to find required information.

There are only a few works which apply faceted navigation for XML data and these works are based on predefined objects and facets which need human effort. In contrast, this framework needs human decision making only when choosing objects and facets to be used in the faceted navigation interface.

This paper puts forward a MARC-based semiautomated approach to extracting semantically rich subject facets from general and/or specialized controlled vocabularies for display in topic-oriented faceted catalog interfaces in a way that would better support users' exploratory search tasks.

Hierarchical faceted subject metadata is extracted from general and/or specialized controlled vocabularies by using standard client/server communication protocols. Rigorous facet analysis, classification and linguistic principles are applied on top of that to ensure faceting accuracy and consistency.

A shallow application of facet analysis and classification, together with poorly organized displays, is one of the major barriers to effective faceted navigation in library, archive and museum catalogs.

This paper does not deal with Web-scale discovery services.

This paper offers suggestions that can be used by the technical services departments of libraries, archives and museums in designing and developing more powerful exploratory search interfaces.

This paper addresses the problem of deriving clearly delineated topical facets from existing metadata for display in a user-friendly, high-level topical overview that is meant to encourage a multidimensional exploration of local collections as well as “learning by browsing.”

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a faceted OPAC interface offers improvements to information discovery in scholarly research.

The 5.2 million records of an entire library catalog were loaded into a faceted navigation interface and an attractive search term suggestion tool. Humanities PhD students at the dissertation level and familiar with this collection were observed while using this interface to continue their research into the literature on their dissertation topic.

From a group of 12 subjects, nine reported finding materials that they had not found in their previous use of the traditional catalog interface.

No attempt is made to isolate the effects of relevance ranking on discovery from those of faceted navigation or the search term suggestions. The differences between the circumstances of scholars who did and did not find previously undiscovered materials are not examined.

Faceted interface and search term suggestion in a library catalog may enable those scholars who are highly dependent on library materials to find materials that would remain hidden in a traditional library catalog.

This article considers whether faceted navigation increases the range of relevant materials that scholars discover, and is of interest to libraries which are considering adding faceted navigation and other features to their catalog interface.

For digital libraries, it is useful to understand how users search in a collection. Investigating search patterns can help them to improve the user interface, collection management and search algorithms. However, search patterns may vary widely in different parts of a collection. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to identify these search patterns within a well-curated historical newspaper collection using the existing metadata.

The authors analyzed search logs combined with metadata records describing the content of the collection, using this metadata to create subsets in the logs corresponding to different parts of the collection.

The study shows that faceted search is more prevalent than non-faceted search in terms of number of unique queries, time spent, clicks and downloads. Distinct search patterns are observed in different parts of the collection, corresponding to historical periods, geographical regions or subject matter.

First, this study provides deeper insights into search behavior at a fine granularity in a historical newspaper collection, by the inclusion of the metadata in the analysis. Second, it demonstrates how to use metadata categorization as a way to analyze distinct search patterns in a collection.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a scheme that allows users to interactively explore relations between entities in knowledge bases (KBs). KBs store a wide range of knowledge about real-world entities in a structured form as (subject, predicate, object). Although it is possible to query entities and relations among entities by specifying appropriate query expressions of SPARQL or keyword queries, the structure and the vocabulary are complicated, and it is hard for non-expert users to get the desired information. For this reason, many researchers have proposed faceted search interfaces for KBs. Nevertheless, existing ones are designed for finding entities and are insufficient for finding relations.

To this problem, the authors propose a novel “relation facet” to find relations between entities. To generate it, they applied clustering on predicates for grouping those predicates that are connected to common objects. Having generated clusters of predicates, the authors generated a facet according to the result. Specifically, they proposed to use a couple of clustering algorithms, namely, agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) and CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) tensor decomposition which is one of the tensor decomposition methods.

The authors experimentally show test the performance of clustering methods and found that AHC performs better than tensor decomposition. Besides, the authors conducted a user study and show that their proposed scheme performs better than existing ones in the task of searching relations.

The authors propose a relation-oriented faceted search method for KBs that allows users to explore relations between entities. As far as the authors know, this is the first method to focus on the exploration of relations between entities.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and implement a faceted classification structure to improve web information organization, access and navigability.

Some case studies of commercial web sites using faceted metadata were analyzed to develop the classification approach. The proposed framework adapts the facet analysis theory from Faceted Classification System (FCS) to use semantic web tools especially XML and RDF store, and ontology, and is designed to be integrated within a Content Management System (CMS). A detailed example of a faceted classification system for an academic information system is used to demonstrate the construction of an FCS from metadata.

Detailed examples show how classifying and organizing information in multidimensional hierarchies is more accessible than simple one‐dimensional taxonomic hierarchies.

A prototype, based on the proposed framework, is being developed using the web site of an academic institution as a case study.

Enhances the FCS research with a notion of integrating ontology driven faceted classification structures by XML/RDF language and content management tools. A dynamic approach to organizing and searching web information provides users with multiple ways of accessing information based on their knowledge and information needs.

Development of an effective search system and interface largely depends on usability studies. The aim of this paper is to present the results of an empirical evaluation of a prototype web site search and browsing tool based on multidimensional taxonomies derived from the use of faceted classification.

A prototype Faceted Classification System (FCS), which classifies and organizes web documents under different facets (orthogonal sets of categories), was implemented on the domain of an academic institute. Facet are created from content oriented metadata, and then assembled into multiple taxonomies that describe alternative classifications of the web site content, such as by subject and location. The search and browsing interfaces use these taxonomies to enable users to access information in multiple ways. The paper compares the FCS interfaces to the existing single‐classification system to evaluate the usability of the facets in typical navigation and searching tasks.

The findings suggest that performance and usability are significantly better with the FCS in the areas of efficient access, search success, flexibility, understanding of content, relevant search result, and satisfaction. These results are especially promising since unfamiliarity often leads users to reject new search interfaces.

The results of the study in this paper can significantly contribute to interface research in the IR community, emphasizing the advantages of multidimensional taxonomies in online information collections.