Relevance is a complex concept which reflects aspects of a query, a document, and the user as well as contextual factors. Relevance involves many factors such as the user's preferences, task, stage in their information-seeking, domain knowledge, intent, and the context of a particular search. Tom Burton-West, one of the HathiTrust developers, has been working on practical relevance ranking for all the volumes in HathiTrust for a number of years.
(by Kat Hagedorn, Christina Powell, Lance Stuchell and John Weise) The one constant in digital preservation over the past couple of decades has been change. Digitization standards have changed as equipment has improved and become more affordable, formats have come and gone, and tools have been developed to help with automated format creation and validation. The progress made on this front has been great, but how do we reconcile older content with current digitization and preservation standards?
In February, we released the first part of the advanced search interface for HathiTrust full-text search. Today we released the second phase of advanced search. You can now combine up to four different fields connected by the "AND" or "OR" operators, and any limits set are retained if you click on the "Revise this advanced search" on the search results page.
Today we released the third high priority feature identified by the HathiTrust Full-text Search Working Group: relevance ranking for "Search in this text."
On July 27th, we went live with faceted search and relevance ranking based on both OCR and MARC metadata in Full-Text Search in HathiTrust.
We have recently made a number of significant updates to the HathiTrust Digital Library.
We just released a new feature in our full-text Large Scale Search for HathiTrust. When you do a search, you will see check boxes next to each search result. You can select items you want from the search results and create a personal collection.