What is it about?
Understanding book search behaviour of online users is among the core issues for Information Retrieval (IR) and Interactive IR (IIR) with stakeholders from the Web, Digital Libraries, Institutional Repositories, Information Science, Library & Information Science, Publishers, and e-Commerce. This understanding is essential not only to understand the information needs of the users to develop efficient and usable search and recommendation services but also from the perspective of publishers and other e-Commerce applications to increase book sales and revenue by directing users to the required intended books. To achieve such an understanding, researchers have left no stone unturned by organising and contributing to several IIR evaluation campaigns under the Initiative for XML Retrieval (INEX) and Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). These include INEX Interactive Track (iTrack) from 2004 to 2010, Active Reading Task (ART) from 2008 to 2011, the Interactive track at Culture Heritage in CLEF (CHiCi) in 2013, and Interactive Social Book Search (iSBS) from 2014 to 2016. All of these continued with the same goal of understanding how users interact with book collections containing rich professionally-curated and socially-constructed metadata or user-generated content and what is the effect of the user interface on their search behavior to better understand their information needs. The details about these tracks and their findings have been published from time to time in the form of user studies and overview papers scattered across several publication venues. However, to the best of our knowledge, we find no review that could present a holistic view of the findings primarily from the perspective of Interactive SBS or book search behaviour in rich book collections to find relevant books. The available overview papers are unable to report most of the essential details from the available relevant papers. The paper aims to fill this literature gap and identifies commonalities and differences in findings across these tracks with possible future directions.
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Why is it important?
The authors collected and reviewed all the overview papers published during 2004-2016 regarding INEX (Initiative for XML Retrieval) Interactive Track (iTrack) 2004-10 (mainly 2009-10), INEX Active Reading Task (ART) 2008-11, CHiCi task 2013, and iSBS 2014-16 to collect the relevant details. Other papers that are either citing or cited in the overview papers were included. The open Web was also used to see if any other details are available about these tracks and tasks. To present the overall picture of Interactive SBS, all the collected papers were carefully reviewed to collect findings, understand their commonalities and conflicts, and identify possible trends and future research directions.
Perspectives
The review paper presents a birds-eye-view and a complete picture of the current progress made under Interactive Social Book Search (iSBS) and graphically illustrates it using a timeline as well as in tabular forms. It summarises the users’ book search behaviour understood so far from the overall progress made under Interactive SBS in the two decades. The paper aims to bring researchers from these related domains on a single page towards understanding their book search behaviour in the context of Interactive SBS to develop more efficient retrieval and recommendation services. It covers several aspects of the book search behaviour of users while interacting with professional metadata and user-generated content and how this behaviour gets affected by the design of user interface, search system, language barriers and in dealing with complex search tasks. The review article is the first of its kind that tracks the overall progress made so far in understanding users’ book search behaviour in the context of Social Book Search. We believe that the article best matches to the audience of Behaviour & Information Technology, it covers several important topics and aspects including but is not limited to Human-Computer Interaction, Interactive Information Retrieval, Usability, User Interface Design, Exploratory Search, Information Science, Collaborative Social Cataloguing applications such as Amazon and LibraryThing.
Irfan Ullah
University of Peshawar
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On the search behaviour of users in the context of interactive social book search, Behaviour and Information Technology, April 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/0144929x.2019.1599069.
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