What is it about?
In 2008, two of the authors conducted a study to see how searches behaved in the MLA International Bibliography when conducted on different platforms. Having discovered discrepancies when comparing results, those authors, plus two more, repeated the study in 2013 and reported on the results in this 2014 article.
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Why is it important?
Searchers, especially those working together from different institutions, need to be aware that their searches may not produce identical results from platform to platform. Further, vendors are also interested in these comparisons in order to understand and modify/improve their own algorithms.
Perspectives
Our 2008 article resulted in one vendor spending approx. 18 months making a change to their algorithm in order to produce a better result when one particular difference was identified in that article. Our 2014 article showed that this improvement had been made and that results, while still not exactly the same, were closer than they had been in 2008. That not only informs users, but supports vendors and makes a difference.
Ms Aline Soules
California State University, East Bay
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Navigating the MLA Bibliography—Redux: Performance Across Vendor Platforms and Discovery Tools, Journal of Library Administration, February 2014, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/01930826.2014.903367.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
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