Ted P Gemberling wrote:
> too. Actually, in some ways getting no hits is a useful thing. It's the
> "real world." It shows you've gone down one blind alley and need to try
> another path.
It's a blind alley only if we are unable to provide exits from it. You
seem to be suggesting that we should intentionally refrain from
automatically providing alternatives in a zero-hit search--that is,
intentionally frustrate the user--because it will be of educational
value to the user.
That's not really what you're suggesting, is it?
Now, it may be that not _any_ alternative to a zero-hit search is
useful. In an extreme exagerated example, I wouldn't, for instance,
advocate simply presenting the user with a random bib record chosen from
the catalog if she has run into a zero hit search. But if we can come up
with potentially useful exits from that otherwise blind alley, for
instance by useful spelling suggestion, is this not a service to the user?
I don't think it is our role to intentionally frustrate the user for
educational purposes. It's our role to do our best to get the user what
they want, meeting them at the experience level they are at, making as
efficient use of their time as possible.
Jonathan
> But certainly no user should have to find "serjeant"
> entirely on his own. Especially when it would've been easy for me as a
> cataloger to add the 246.
>
> On Google's "did you mean?" feature: there has never been a case where
> they suggested a different spelling that was helpful to me. In a lot of
> cases, there just were no hits for the spellings I used, and those were
> the spellings I had to search. But I'm sure it helps some people.
>
> Ted Gemberling
> UAB Lister Hill Library
> (205)934-2461
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Dan Scott
> Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2007 11:16 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: [NGC4LIB] Spell checking (was "Elitism - and Aristotle again!")
>
> On 05/08/07, Ted P Gemberling <tgemberl_at_uab.edu> wrote:
> <snip>
>
>> I work in a medical library, and a couple of days ago I cataloged a
>>
> book
>
>> on a physician in the 17th century, "Serjeant [sic] Surgeon John
>> Knight."
>>
> </snip>
>
> Hi Ted:
>
> I'm going to jump on this because it's useful, for me, to try and
> introduce a thread on a feature offered by current catalogues that
> hopefully will be able to be better implemented by next generation
> catalogs.
>
> I took a look at the UAB Lister Hill catalogue because I was
> interested in how you or your catalog handled the variant spelling of
> "sergeant" used in the title.
>
> I found that you chose not to include the variant spelling anywhere in
> the MARC record, so there would be no direct hits for someone who
> searched on "sergeant surgeon john knight" (using the most common
> spelling form of "sergeant") if they were simply searching from
> memory. This is consistent with what I found at a couple of other
> libraries that had catalogued the same resource, so you're in good
> company there!
>
> When I tried searching for "sergeant surgeon john knight", I found
> that your catalogue (Horizon?) was almost helpful:
>
> 1) it provides a phone number where people can get help;
>
> 2) it provides a linked search for "Did you mean?". Unfortunately, it
> chose "sergent surgeon john knight" as the suggested search, which
> also results in zero hits.
>
> 3) it provides a list of alternate possible search terms to use
> instead of sergeant, of which "serjeant" is the second word listed.
> Unfortunately, none of the terms is linked, so the user has to modify
> the search terms manually if they want to search. And none of the
> terms has any sort of rank-weighting explicitly shown, so there's no
> guarantees that using any of the terms will actually result in a hit
> in the catalog.
>
> In my work with Evergreen, I've seen similar behaviour (suggested
> search terms that result in no hits); it's great that it offers
> spell-checking, but there's room for improvement in how it is surfaced
> to the user. Maybe we can set requirements for the way that
> spellchecking would ideally work for the next generation of
> catalogues; something like:
>
> 1) Show suggested alternate terms only if using that term will
> actually result in at least one hit in the catalog. Show estimated
> hits that will result if that term is used in place of the incorrect
> term.
>
> 1a) This gets complex if there are two or more suspected misspelled
> words. Perhaps rank the suggested alternate phrases by the estimated
> hits that will result from each combination?
>
> 2) Make each suggested term a clickable link. If the user searched for
> a phrase, show the modified term highlighted in the context of the
> entire phrase so it's clear that clicking the link will resubmit the
> search for the entire phrase.
>
> Beyond this, what about including thesaurus-like capabilities for
> increasing recall as well? Most dictionaries recognize variant
> spellings of words and point towards the most common form; so taking
> advantage of this capability and giving the user the opportunity to
> broaden their search (by ORing variant terms and synonyms under the
> covers) would seem to make a lot of sense. Recognizing homonyms (pale
> imitation vs. pail imitation) as a possible alternative search
> direction would be another way to take advantage of this body of
> knowledge.
>
> Perhaps these steps towards improving the user experience for spell
> checking and term-broadening are too basic to qualify for a
> next-generation catalogue. But the current state of spell-checking in
> today's catalogues is not impressive.
>
> Worldcat does not seem to provide any spell-checking at all.
>
> Koha (at least as implemented at Crawford County Federated Libraries)
> might be going too far in its spell-checking implementation. A search
> for "serjeant" returns 11 hits, none of which contain the term
> "serjeant". "Ah", I thought, "Koha is using thesaurus expansion to
> automatically search 'sergeant' as well!" But I thought wrong; a
> search on "sergeant" returns 15 hits. More interesting, a search on
> "sergant" returns 42 hits, most of them for "servant". A search on
> "pail" returns hits for records that don't contain the word "pail" but
> do contain "Paul" and "mail", so it seems as though some
> single-character wild carding is automatically being used for the
> default keyword search and no feedback is being given to the user
> about what happened to their search terms. For my taste, this is
> trading off precision too early in the search experience in return for
> gobs of recall.
>
> I think we can work towards a UI experience for spell-checking in
> catalogues that is biased towards precision, but enables the user to
> quickly expand recall via spell-checking and thesaurus capabilities in
> a helpful (that is, offer no suggestions that lead to zero hits) and
> progressively disclosed (that is, leave the user in control of the
> search session) manner.
>
> --
> Dan Scott
> Laurentian University
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Tue Aug 07 2007 - 13:25:00 EDT