Knowledge Bank

A paragraph description of "what the book is about" taken from Book Review Digest is used to evaluate information on the bibliographic record. It is first determined to what extent book descriptions match either subject headings or keywords in the title. Segments of the bibliographic record are then examined to determine their potential for retrieving the book described. The combination of approaches used to simulate manipulation of the data in the record increased recall in the sample by 20%. Keyword matching in the personal name and corporate name subject fields is a way to increase both precision and recall.