Subject No-hits Searches in an Academic Library Online Catalog: An Exploration of Two Potential Ameliorations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes a study that explored ways in which users’ subject-searching problems in a local online catalog might be reduced. On a weekly basis, the author reviewed catalog transaction logs to identify topics of subject searches retrieving no records for which appropriate information resources may actually be represented in the catalog. For topics thus identified, the author explored two potential ameliorations of the no-hits search results through the use of authority record cross-references and “pathfinder” records providing brief instructions on search refinement. This paper describes the study findings, discusses possible concerns regarding the amelioration methods used, outlines additional steps needed to determine whether the potential ameliorations make a difference to users’ searching experiences, and suggests related areas for further research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.043 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it