Effective Metadata for Social Book Search from a User Perspective

In this extended abstract we describe our participation in the INEX 2014 Interactive Social Book Search Track. In previous work, we have looked at the impact of professional and user-generated metadata in the context of book search, and compared these different categories of metadata in terms of retrieval effectiveness. Here, we take a different approach and study the use of professional and user-generated metadata of books in an interactive setting, and the effectivity of this metadata from a user perspective. We compare the perceived usefulness of general descriptions, publication metadata, user reviews and tags in focused and open-ended search tasks, based on data gathered in the INEX Interactive Social Book Search Track. Furthermore, we take a tentative look at the actual use of different types of metadata over time in the aggregated search tasks. Our preliminary findings in the surveyed tasks indicate that user reviews are generally perceived to be more useful than other types of metadata, and they are frequently mentioned in users’ rationales for selecting books. Furthermore, we observe a varying usage frequency of traditional and user-generated metadata across time in the aggregated search tasks, providing initial indications that these types of metadata might be useful at different stages of a search task.