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A novel library catalogue system
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Abstract:
It has become an increasing challenge to apply knowledge management tools in modern library information systems that deliver the most up-to-date and relevant information to end users in a quick, efficient and user-friendly manner. According to a survey on city council libraries in the Sydney area, there is a proliferation of common problems associated with searching speed and accuracy, scalability and the user-friendly interface, all of which are closely related to the performance of the catalogue search scheme. The library information systems currently used in local public council libraries are usually decades old, and therefore cannot meet requirements due to the rapid increase in the amount and categories of library collections. The current marketing price for a library catalogue system (including the maintenance expenses) can be prohibitively high. While a large size organization such as a university can afford to install and maintain such a modern system for superior performance, it could be infeasible for some of the public council libraries and/or primary/high schools to purchase and maintain an existing market product to meet their ever-increasing needs. For those libraries, updating and improving the current information systems using open source software, through collaboration with universities, could provide a better solution. This Master Degree project is proposed to address such a challenge. Apart from such practical motivations, this project also possesses theoretic significance. The algorithms to be developed provide not only a practical solution for library catalogue systems but also a novel methodology applicable to database management system designing with respect to speedy and user-friendly information retrieval. The proposed web-based library system involves client/server architecture with multiple tiers. For performance enhancement in terms of searching speed and error tolerance, two key techniques have been employed: soundexing and adaptive caching. As soundexing is a hashing system with one soundex corresponding many words, a soundex search may bring about irrelevant results and thus reduce the precision of the search. It is just this limitation that has restricted the application of soundexing techniques in general information systems. Some measures have been investigated in our project to ameliorate this limitation, such as to increase the length of the soundex codes, or to use the Metaphone, a phonetic algorithm to produce variable length keys. For database cache, query normalization is adopted to reduce the redundancies existing in the cache and to increase the hitting rate. While there is still room for further improvement of the developed library catalogue system, the testing results are encouraging and meet the expectations of the project.
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Keyword:
design; information storage and retrieval systems; libraries; Master of Science (Hons.); online library catalogs; open source software; performance; public libraries; Soundex; Sydney (N.S.W.)
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URL: http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/44313
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