code4lib, day 2, part 2 (morning talks) 2006 February 16
The first regular morning talk was given by Colleen Whitney. She talked about “Generating Recommendations in OPACs.” Some things they are looking at are using circulation data to relevance rankings and an index-based spell check. The recommendations stuff is interesting, but I’m not so sure I like the limiting of the relevance of circulation records to call number range. I’m afraid that doing so will hide the many multi-disciplinary titles that are of use — which may be the hardest to find using more traditional relevance ranking methods.
The second talk was by Robert Sanderson who discussed “Library Text Mining” of bibliographic data using Chesire3. He mostly focused on the way Chesire3 works.
The third talk of the morning, “Antanomy of aDORe,” was given by Ryan Chute. aDORe “is a write-once/read-many storage approach for Digital Objects and their constituent datastreams.”
Like Chesire3 talk earlier in this session, aDORe Archive is an interesting project – but one that I really don’t have any use for in my environment. I guess this is one of the advantages of many short 20-minute sessions, we can learn a little bit about stuff we wouldn’t know about and have very little reason to use. I would probably never go to a session on aDORe or Chesire3 if they were longer because I know I’m not going to use it anytime soon. However, it is nice to see what projects people that have different needs then someone like me are working on and get an overview of what is out there.