A Study of the Bibliographic Relationships of the Book Search Results of Amazon.com
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Nien, Yun-chen
Abstract
The library catalogue is the most important tool to bridge a library’s collection and its users. Nowadays, users are often faced with the problem of information overload and find it difficult to search for relevant and useful information. Thus, how to provide a better platform and mechanism to enhance users’ searching experiences has become a very important issue. One of the possible directions is to improve the way that search results are displayed. Traditionally, libraries prefer to catalog each book as an individual bibliographic entity. This practice will not be able to collocate related works properly. Moreover, people are getting used to the search interface provided by Google or Amazon.com, this change makes the aforementioned practice a more critical issue.mazon.com is the first and the most successful Internet bookstore. Amazon.com employs some means to keep the visitors continually browsing its products. One of its mechanisms is to create a lot of linkages among its products to encourage its visitors to keep clicking on them. The goal of Amazon.com is to sell more of its products. Similarly, the library wants to increase and facilitate the use of its collection as well. This functional similarity suggests that the library professionals should understand and learn how Amazon.com provides links and how they work. This study, thus, aims to explore the linking relationships and linkage types presented in the book search results of Amazon.com.hakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was chosen as the target work because it is a classic and has many different versions and various formats. The complication of its publishing status is useful in helping us get an overall picture of Amazon.com’s link relationships. The investigation was divided into two stages. First, a search for Romeo and Juliet was conducted on Amazon.com, and the first 100 titles of the search results were selected for further analysis. The reason why the first 100 titles were selected is because most people would not examine more than 100 records during a search session (Wiberley, Daugherty, & Danowski, 1995). The results of the first stage analysis reveal that nine types of linking relationship are found in the first 100 titles. These are equivalence relationships, derivation relationships, descriptive relationships, content relationships, accompanying relationships, whole-part relationships, responsibility relationships, subject relationships, and title relationships.n the second stage, five titles were purposively selected from the first 100 titles examined in the first stage. These five titles represent the following selection criteria: a version of Romeo and Juliet, a descriptive work of Romeo and Juliet, an adaption of Romeo and Juliet, a translation of Romeo and Juliet, and a version of Romeo and Juliet in different media. The results show that there are 13 types of linking relationships found in the Web pages of these five titles. These relationships comprise of equivalence relationships, derivation relationships, responsibility relationships, subject relationships, items viewed by the same customer relationships, the same category (assigned by the system) relationships, items bought by the same customer relationships, customer review relationships, the same booklist relationships, the same customer tags relationships, link by system advertisement relationships, citation relationships, and the same keyword relationships. The last 9 kinds of relationships are different from the traditional bibliographic relationships. These linkage relationships are based upon two factors: the relationship is either linked by customers or connected by the system. These relationships can be viewed as shared characteristics relationships as well.ased on the findings, the researcher then proposes the following suggestions. First, in Amazon.com, the page of each book record comprises of various information blocks. The contents of these information blocks will vary according to user’s browsing movements. In other words, the contents are based on user’s interests and the purpose is to attain the user’s attention. It means that the display of library OPACs could be more targeted toward the users. Second, in Amazon.com, an item might repetitively appear in different information blocks. The purpose is to increase the linkage to the item and enhance the visibility of the item. If we believe that every book has its reader, we should take this approach into consideration when designing an OPAC. Finally, more and more catalog user studies report that users prefer one-stop-shopping system. Amazon.com may not be an ideal information model to satisfy the needs. However, it does demonstrate a model which is focused on attracting and attaining its visitors. From the perspective of bibliographic relationships, it does employ many linking mechanisms that have been neglected by the library professionals. We definitely can learn something from Amazon.com to improve our OPAC systems.
Subjects
Bibliographic Relationships
Linkage Relationships
Library Catalog
OPAC
Type
thesis
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