Users and Uses of a Global Union Catalogue: a Mixed-Methods Study of WorldCat.org

This paper presents the first large-scale investigation of the users and uses of WorldCat.org, the world’s largest bibliographic database and global union catalogue. Using a mixed-methods approach involving focus group interviews with 120 participants, an online survey with 2,918 responses, and an analysis of transaction logs of approximately 15 million sessions from WorldCat.org, the study provides a new understanding of the context for global union catalogue use. We find that WorldCat.org is accessed by diverse population, with the three primary user groups being librarians, students and academics. Use of the system is found to fall within three broad types of work-task (professional, academic, and leisure), and we also present an emergent taxonomy of search tasks which encompass known-item, unknown-item, and institutional information searches. Our results support the notion that union catalogues are primarily used for known-item searches, although the volume of traffic to WorldCat.org means that unknown-item searches nonetheless represent an estimated 250,000 sessions per month. Search engine referrals account for almost half of all traffic, but whilst WorldCat.org effectively connects users referred from institutional library catalogues to other libraries holding a sought item, users arriving from a search engine are less likely to connect to a librar

Establishing User Requirements for a Recommender System in an Online Union Catalogue: an Investigation of WorldCat.org

This project, undertaken in collaboration with OCLC, aimed to investigate the potential role of recommendations within WorldCat, the publicly accessible union catalogue of libraries participating in the OCLC global cooperative. The goal of the project was a set of conceptual design guidelines for a WorldCat.org recommender system, based on a comprehensive understanding of the systems users and their needs. Taking a mixed-methods approach, the investigation consisted of four phases. Phase one consisted of twenty-one focus groups with key user goups held in three locations; the UK, the US, and Australia and New Zealand. Phase 2 consisted of a pop-up survey implemented on WorldCat.org, and gathered 2,918 responses. Phase three represented an analysis of two months of WorldCat.org transaction log data, consisting of over 15,000,000 sessions. Phase four was a lab based user study investigating and comparing the use of WorldCat.org with Amazon. Findings from each strand were integrated, and the key themes to emerge from the research are discussed. Different methods of classifying the WorldCat.org user population are presented, along with a taxonomy of work- and search-tasks. Key perspectives on the utility of a recommender system are considered, along with a reflection on how the information search behaviour exhibited by users interacting with recommendations while undertaking typical catalogue tasks can be interpreted. Based on the enriched perspective of the system, and the role of recommendation in the catalogue, a series of conceptual design specifications are presented for the development of a WorldCat.org recommender system

Regional Effects on Query Reformulation Patterns

This paper describes an in-depth study of the effects of geographic region on search patterns; particularly query reformulations, in a large query log from the UK National Archives (TNA). A total of 1,700 sessions involving 9,447 queries from 17 countries were manually analyzed for their semantic composition and pairs of queries for their reformulation type. Results show country-level variations for the types of queries commonly issued and typical patterns of query reformulation. Understanding the effects of regional differences will assist with the future design of search algorithms at TNA as they seek to improve their international reach