OKAPI: Evaluating and Enhancing an Experimental Online Catalog
Stephen Walker · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1987
THIS ARTICLE ORIGINATES from work carried out on the design and evaluation of experimental online catalogs at the Polytechnic of Central London (PCL).The research and development has been funded by the British Library Research and Development Department (BLR&DD) and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).The initial phases of the project-investigation of relevant work, design and development of a prototype catalog, trial single-terminal installation at PCL, live evaluation, and publication of a substantial report'-were carried out by a team consisting of Gillian Venner, Nathalie Mitev, and myself.These phases occurred from November 1982 to May 1985.The prototype catalog was named OKAPI (Online Keyword Access to Public Information).After a hiatus of some months, further funding was granted by BLR&DD (starting in July 1985) to investigate various methods of improving recall or rather ways of reducing the considerable proportion of OPAC searches which fail for various reasons.This is referred to as the "fuzzy matching" project.Further funding has now been granted for a concurrent project on the use of relevance feedback during catalog searching.To understand some of what follows it is necessary to have some idea of what the Mark 1 OKAPI looks like and how it behaves.There isa fairly full description in Designing an Online Public Access Catalogue by Mitev et a1.