You Can Lead Them to Water, But You Can't Make Them Drink: Using Crowd Sourcing to Lead Library Patrons to Extended Library Services Relevant to their Search Criteria

摘要

The Lee Library at Brigham Young University has extensive resources in the forms of highly skilled subject librarians, print resources and digital collections, but getting the students to be aware of and use them effectively is a problem. To help inform library patrons of these resources librarian subject specialists have created over 150 subject guides using LibGuides for subject areas, classes, and some subspecialties, which was an enormous task; but are these resources being used effectively? This paper explores and reports on a subject guide recommender system, which recommends relevant subject guides based on patron searches, using a crowd sourced folksonomy and statistical classification between subject areas and search terms. These initial results are encouraging in that 80% of the recommendations are rated as relevant by the user.