Endeca @ NCSU Libraries

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Endeca _at_ NCSU Libraries

• Kristin Antelman
• NCSU Libraries
• June 24, 2006

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Overview

• The problem
• Quick demo
• Technical overview
• Implementation process
• Use data
• Assessment data
• Next steps

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Why did we do this?

• Existing catalogs are hard to use
• known item searching works pretty well, but
• users often do keyword searching on topics and
  get large result sets returned in system sort
  order
• catalogs are unforgiving on spelling errors,
  stemming

NO RELEVANCY!
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Catalog value is buried

• Subject headings are not leveraged in searching
• they should be browsed or linked from, not
  searched

• Data from the item record is not leveraged
• should be able to filter by item type, location,
  circulation status, popularity

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What does the Endeca software do?

• Provides search software for ecommerce companies

• Faceted browse of structured metadata goal is to
  expose the ontology

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Endeca technical overview
Endeca Information Access Platform
NCSU exports and reformats
Data Foundry
MDEX Engine
Parse text files
Raw MARC data
Indices
Flat text files
HTTP
HTTP
NCSU Web Application
Client browser
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Integrating Endeca - Enhancements

• MarcAdapter plugin for raw MARC data.
• Eliminate need for external MARC 21 translation
  and file merging
• Partial Updates
• Update circulation data multiple times throughout
  the day

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Implementation process

• Timeline
• License / negotiation Spring 2005
• Acquire Summer 2005
• Implementation August 2005 January 12, 2006

• 7 representative team members
• functional requirements, metadata, interface
  issues (total of 40-60 hours)
• project manager approximately 10 hours per week
  for 20 weeks
• Java-trained librarian (30-40 hrs/wk for 14
  weeks)

• It doesnt have to be perfect!

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Key decision points

• Search interface

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Main search page
Endeca
Web2
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Advanced search
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A few major issues

• Search interface

• Selecting dimensions and their order

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Dimensions
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A few major issues

• Search interface

• Selecting dimensions and their order

• Defining the relevance algorithm

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Relevance defined

• Relevance ranking in Endeca select from a
  variety of modules and order them based on
  importance
• At NCSU
• Original query term(s) (no thesaurus, stemming,
  spell correction)
• Exact phrase match
• Field ranking (Title higher than Author higher
  than Table of Contents, etc.)
• Number of fields that contain term(s)

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Use data
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Some search statistics (March - May 2006)
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Sorting statistics (March May 2006)
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Some navigation statistics (March - May 2006)
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Assessment
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Some user reaction

• The new Endeca system is incredible. It would be
  difficult to exaggerate how much better it is
  than our old online card catalog (and therefore
  that of most other universities). I've found
  myself searching the catalog just for fun,
  whereas before it was a chore to find what I
  needed.
• - NCSU Undergrad, Statistics
• The new library catalog search features are a
  big improvement over the old system. Not only is
  the search extremely fast, but seemingly it's
  much more intelligent as well.
• - NCSU faculty, Psychology

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Topical searching tasks
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Average topical task duration
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Testing relevance

• Are search results in Endeca more likely to be
  relevant to a users query than search results in
  Web2 OPAC?
• 100 topical user searches from 1 month in fall
  2005
• How many of top 5 results relevant?
• 40 relevant in Web2 OPAC
• 68 relevant in Endeca catalog

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Future plans

• FRBR-ized displays

• FAST (Faceted Access to Subject Terms) instead of
  LCSH

• Enrich records with supplemental content

• More integration with website search

• Use Endeca to index local collections

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Thank you
project page www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca