Applications of soundexing retrieval and query caching in an open-source-software based library catalogue system

In some small organizations with limited resources, based on authors’ survey, the library facilities could be decade old. Current marketing prices of library software, including upkeep costs, are prohibitively high. Improving and updating these library information systems by employing open-source-software might provide a better solution. In this paper, the authors present the design of an open source software based library catalogue system that takes multi-tier client/server architecture. Furthermore, techniques of soundexing retrieval and query caching are applied to enhance the system performance with respect to error tolerance, searching speed and scalability. With the support of an appropriately designed soundex algorithm, the catalogue system can largely increase its recall while not compromise the searching precision. The introduced query cache, on the other hand, can increase significantly the system response speed and thus the scalability. The performance of the developed prototype system is verified by simulations using real library data

An open source software based library catalogue system using soundexing retrieval and query caching

It has been a challenge to apply effective knowledge management tools in information systems for modern libraries that deliver the most up-to-date, relevant information to end users in a quick, efficient, and user-friendly manner. In this paper, the authors present the design of a library catalogue system using principally open source software. The integrated web-based library system takes client/server architecture with multiple tiers. For performance enhancement with respect to error tolerance, searching speed and scalability, techniques of soundexing retrieval and query caching were applied. With the support of an appropriately designed soundex algorithm, the catalogue system can largely increase its recall while not compromising the search precision. On the other side, the introduced query cache speeds up the system response significantly

A novel library catalogue system

It has become an increasing challenge to apply knowledge management tools in modern library information systems that deliver the most up-to-date and relevant information to end users in a quick, efficient and user-friendly manner. According to a survey on city council libraries in the Sydney area, there is a proliferation of common problems associated with searching speed and accuracy, scalability and the user-friendly interface, all of which are closely related to the performance of the catalogue search scheme. The library information systems currently used in local public council libraries are usually decades old, and therefore cannot meet requirements due to the rapid increase in the amount and categories of library collections. The current marketing price for a library catalogue system (including the maintenance expenses) can be prohibitively high. While a large size organization such as a university can afford to install and maintain such a modern system for superior performance, it could be infeasible for some of the public council libraries and/or primary/high schools to purchase and maintain an existing market product to meet their ever-increasing needs. For those libraries, updating and improving the current information systems using open source software, through collaboration with universities, could provide a better solution. This Master Degree project is proposed to address such a challenge. Apart from such practical motivations, this project also possesses theoretic significance. The algorithms to be developed provide not only a practical solution for library catalogue systems but also a novel methodology applicable to database management system designing with respect to speedy and user-friendly information retrieval. The proposed web-based library system involves client/server architecture with multiple tiers. For performance enhancement in terms of searching speed and error tolerance, two key techniques have been employed: soundexing and adaptive caching. As soundexing is a hashing system with one soundex corresponding many words, a soundex search may bring about irrelevant results and thus reduce the precision of the search. It is just this limitation that has restricted the application of soundexing techniques in general information systems. Some measures have been investigated in our project to ameliorate this limitation, such as to increase the length of the soundex codes, or to use the Metaphone, a phonetic algorithm to produce variable length keys. For database cache, query normalization is adopted to reduce the redundancies existing in the cache and to increase the hitting rate. While there is still room for further improvement of the developed library catalogue system, the testing results are encouraging and meet the expectations of the project