Search Personalization: Knowledge-Based Recommendation in Digital Libraries

Recommendation engines have made great strides in understanding and implementing search personalization techniques to provide interesting and relevant documents to users. The latest research effort advances a new type of recommendation technique, Knowledge Based (KB) engines, that strive to understand the context of the user’s current information need and then filter information accordingly. The KB engine proposed in this paper requires less effort from the user in representing the search task and is the first of its kind implemented in a digital library setting. The KB engine performance was compared with Content Based (CB) and Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommendation techniques and the text search engine Lucene by asking sixty subjects to perform two different tasks to find relevant documents in a database of 212,000 documents from 22 National Science Digital Library (NSDL) collections. Our KB engine design outperforms CB, CF, and text search techniques in nearly all areas of evaluation

The changing professional image of librarians : focusing on the job positions of digital librarians in academic libraries in the United States of America

This content analysis study sought to gauge the technology-induced changing image of librarians in the context of digital environment of academic libraries in the USA via their job titles, responsibilities and qualifications as found in three online mailing lists (LISjobs.com, ALA JobLIST and Juju job search engine). The findings revealed that technological knowledge and skills/experience were the most frequently required/preferred of the 8 ALA’s Core Competences of Librarianship. It equally revealed that master’s degree in LIS or its equivalent was the overwhelmingly required qualification, that more than two-third of the ads required academic or digital library experience, and that the most frequently mentioned non-technology competences/experience included interpersonal and communication, knowledge organization, digital collection management and project management skills as well as the ability to work independently and collaboratively. Implications for prospective digital librarians as well as for library educators/schools were discussed.Joint Master Degree in Digital Library Learning (DILL