The University of Sheffield, in collaboration with library information provider OCLC Research, US, has been awarded funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council to explore a library catalogue recommender system based on the requirements and preferences of users.
The joint Doctoral Award will pay for a Ph.D. student to work for three years with Dr. Paul Clough and Ms. Barbara Sen, lecturers in The Information School at the University of Sheffield, and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway at OCLC, investigating the applicability of the recommender concept to the domain of the library catalogue. Recommender systems suggest items to users that are likely to be of interest to them but have not yet been considered.
The goal of the project is to follow a 'user-centered' approach to the development of a library catalogue recommender system, establishing user needs and preferences before mining the bibliographic data within the WorldCat database to retrieve similar journals, books, digital media and video records that may be of interest. WorldCat allows researchers to experiment with various, large-scale sources of evidence on which to base recommendations, thereby not restricting the recommender system to the holdings and circulation activities of a single institution.
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