Optimizing Relevance Ranking to Enhance the User's Discovery Experience

Abstract

With the introduction of library discovery systems, the display of results according to relevance, as determined by the system, has become a norm. To investigate how relevance ranking could be optimized, a provider of a widely used discovery system developed methods of evaluating the system's relevance ranking. As a result, new factors were added to the calculation of search results' relevance-information about the individual user and the user's information needs, and an indicator representing the academic significance of materials. Methods of monitoring the impact of changes were also established. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.