Content area
To investigate the extent to which online catalogs arrange together, or collocate, records representing particular au- thors and works, a survey compared the displays resulting from five author and five work queries in 18 online cata- logs. Dependent variables to measure collocation included the number of times irrelevant records were interfiled among relevant records. Searches for worst-case authors and works associated with large retrieval sets, including "Homer" and "Paradise Lost," revealed the effects of Boolean versus string matching, query type, and catalog size on the collocation of relevant records. Results of the survey showed that string matching collocated relevant re- cords more successfully than Boolean matching, that au- thor records were collocated more successfully than work records, and, surprisingly, that catalog size had only a small effect on collocation.
Details
Cords;
Polls & surveys;
Card catalogs;
Boolean algebra;
String matching;
Displays;
Libraries;
Queries;
Research & development--R&D;
Dependent variables;
Collocation;
Bibliographic records;
Catalogs;
Library associations;
Information retrieval;
Cataloging rules;
Boolean;
Library catalogs;
Transaction log analysis;
Interlibrary loans;
Internet;
Archives & records;
Retrieval;
Matching;
Variables