2004/07/29
Known-Item Online SEarches Employed by Scholars Using Surname plus First, or Last, or First and Last Title Words
Frederick G. Kilgour
JASIST 52(14):1203-1209 2001.
- Available through LINC
- Printed and Filed
- Relevant to: known item query project
Part of a long series (I think six) articles concerning retrievability of book titles in OPACs using various approaches. This constitutes known item searches. Kilgour and his colleagues are trying to identify and prescribe a useful pattern to use to perform known item query searches.
This paper redoes an earlier experiment when Kilgour used a normal keyword search to do a retrieval experiment using "surname plus first and last title words (not including stop words)" to retrieve books. The main finding of the paper suggests that in 98% of the cases in which a monograph (single author's work) is sought the surname + title word retrieves the item's record (if it does exist in the catalog / database).
In this later experiment, Kilgour uses limits on the fields in which the words can be matched by using MARC field restrictions. The new experiments concur with the first, and do not show additional benefit. As such there is little that is new in the experimental results.
A limitation of the first experiment is that the work only examines monographs. Kilgour addresses this by examining multiple authored / edited works. Surprisingly it is shown in an exploratory experiment that the additional author surnames do not assist in retrieval (Table 5).
Kilgour does suggest, as I have also be musing about, that the search results and the record display (Kilgour uses the terms first and second screens) can be combined in certain cases. It takes only a little bit of inference to see that known item query searches are such cases.
To do: would be good to look at our local LINC transaction logs to see how many of our queries match the prescribed patterns.
N.B.: Kilgour uses the NOTIS system, different than our local INNOPAC and different from Slone's DYNIX study.
