CIRSS

La Barre and Tilley work to enhance full-text search

Through their OCLC/ALISE grant-funded project, Folktales and Facets, Kathryn La Barre and Carol Tilley are working to create a task-focused model for search and discovery systems that gives special consideration to the shared and unique information-seeking tasks of three distinct user groups—scholars, practitioners and laypeople—in order to provide enhanced access to the rich, cultural heritage of folklore resources. They were recently interviewed by the Phil Ciciora, campus news editor:

"There's a lot of excitement about the availability of full text," LaBarre said. "But the perception often is, 'If you have full text, why do you need to do anything else other than providing good search capabilities?' Well, it turns out that full-text search isn't always king, especially for something iterative like folklore literature."

"There are better ways to help people find what they're looking for in those collections," Tilley said. "In folktales, the classic example is where you seldom get any acknowledgment of the geographic distribution of the tales. You might think that there's a trickster story associated with a certain region, but you have no way of knowing without an extra layer of classification. So our goal is to make things more findable in ways that people want to be able to find it."

More information may be found here: http://www.lis.illinois.edu/articles/2011/02/la-barre-tilley-work-enhance-full-text-search