Ordering author and work records: An evaluation of collocation in online catalog displays
Allyson Carlyle · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1996
To investigate the extent to which online catalogs arrange together, or collocate, records representing particular authors and works, a survey compared the displays resulting from five author and five work queries in 18 online catalogs. Dependent variables to measure collocation included the number of times irrelevant records were interfiled among relevant records. Searches for worst-case authors and works associated with large retrieval sets, including “Homer” and “Paradise Lost,” revealed the effects of Boolean versus string matching, query type, and catalog size on the collocation of relevant records. Results of the survey showed that string matching collocated relevant records more successfully than Boolean matching, that author records were collocated more successfully than work records, and, surprisingly, that catalog size had only a small effect on collocation. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.