People who borrowed this have also borrowed: recommender system in academic library

ABSTRACT

The paper analises the use of recommender systems in academic libraries, examining the use of the "Related books in Aleph OPAC" recommendation system for academic libraries' online catalogues. A quantitative approach and descriptive methodology is used to collect, process and analyse the data from a usage log provided by the University of Dundee. The analysis of 13,654 posts and 6,347 sessions provided the following observations: the recommendation was used in 11% of the sessions, and 43.9% of the recorded document views on those sessions where generated by recommendation. 9.6% of the records of document views, were derived from recommendation. Sessions using recommendations were on average 1 minute 18 seconds shorter than the sessions without recommendations. In sessions with recommendation 4.30 records were viewed on average while in sessions without recommendation the average is 1.88. Using more than one type of recommendation is not common, as 82% of the sessions with recommendation have recorded the use of only one kind of recommendation. The analysis of recommendations by kind provided two results: "Related works include" appears in more sessions (348), while "People who borrowed this work also borrowed" has the highest number of posts (584).

Keywords:
Recommender systems; OPACs; Evaluation of information retrieval systems