If we build it, will they come? Recommendations and WorldCat

Abstract

This paper reports on a collaborative research project currently underway between the University of Sheffield's Information School and OCLC, the goal of which is to produce a recommender system for WorldCat.org -the publically accessible aggregated catalogue of the holdings of OCLC's member libraries. It highlights two of the key issues facing recommender systems design in the library domain: 1) Trust: users' trust both in the system itself and in collaboratively generated suggestions; and 2) Context: the difficulties of a system adapting to the huge range of information-seeking contexts that accompany a diverse user base. The paper describes how future qualitative and quantitative research will attempt to address these issues, and produce a system that best serves users of WorldCat.org.It is hoped that as well as contributing to recommender systems research in general, the results of this project will help inform debates relating to the interaction between users and systems in a library context.