Description:
At Oregon State University (OSU), the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science (EECS) and the OSU Libraries are working together on a project to improve the
effectiveness and accessibility of digital information created and collected by academic
libraries. This project focuses on making digital resources more accessible through an
innovative search interface that incorporates collaborative filtering. New approaches to
search interfaces will help make the growing wealth of online content more accessible
and useful. This paper discusses the problem, explains how collaborative filtering works,
describes the System for Electronic Recommendation Filtering (SERF), and then presents
initial results from an installation in the OSU Libraries. The productive collaboration at
OSU between the Libraries and EECS portends the future of development of search
systems; by working together, we can harness the expertise of librarians, computer
scientists, and information users to develop more useful search interfaces and increase
access to the libraries’ resources and services.