Is Granularity the Next Discovery Frontier? Part 1: Supporting Direct Access to Increasingly Granular Chunks of Content

Introduction

Working with Metadata Challenges to Support Granular Levels of Access and Descriptions

As the library collects and provides more resources in digital format, new units of granularity have emerged in access and description. Digital surrogates or born-digital resources makes it possible for more granular levels of access, e.g., a book can be accessed at chapter level and page level in addition to a book or journal title as a whole. In order to provide these granular levels of access, metadata should be created in granular levels as well. This presentation discusses how the emerging needs of granularity of access and description makes the metadata and cataloging process a highly collaborative work, and suggests a way to design and create a metadata schema for describing granular levels of resources with examples tested at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

Granular Discovery: User Experience Challenges and Opportunities

Web-scale discovery services are transforming how users search the library. By combining print and electronic resources with full-text search indexing and relevance ranking, discovery services hold enormous promise in connecting library users to a diversity of high-quality information resources, quickly and easily. The challenge typically isn’t the availability of quality content in a discovery service, but navigating an abundance of content to identify the most relevant content for the user’s specific information need. High quality metadata is a critical ingredient in this process, as it enables intelligent relevance ranking, support for advanced search strategies, and useful post-search refinement options. However user research and log analysis indicates that most discovery service users bypass advanced search options and post-search faceted search refinement options in favor of basic keyword searching to locate content of interest. Delivering effective discovery and access to more granular slices of content requires not only more metadata, but more effective use of metadata and user context to help users locate the specific content of interest. Supporting increasingly granular discovery, while providing the Google-like ease-of-use that users have come to expect, is a major challenge. This presentation describes the user experience challenges associated with supporting more granular discovery, and concludes with several paths forward for future innovation in this space.

From Unstructured Content to Granular Insights

Semantic enrichment is commonly used to identify business objects of interest (People, Companies, Products, terminology, etc…) mentioned in documents and augment their metadata to improve search and navigation. But the same technology can also be used to harvest information on business objects themselves. Documents that we index and search are a treasure trove of such business insights that can be extracted as triples and exploited standalone. In fact, a broad range of intermediary approaches exist to leverage content in increasingly granular ways. In this session we will showcase the principles and concrete examples of information applications built along such approaches. 

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