Abbreviations, Full Spellings, and Searchers’ Preferences

Beall, Jeffrey Abbreviations, Full Spellings, and Searchers’ Preferences. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 2011, vol. 49, n. 6, pp. 443-456. [Journal article (Paginated)]

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English abstract

This study examined ten, selected word pairs, each containing a word's full spelling and its abbreviation, to determine which form search engine users preferred in searching. Using seven search logs gathered from several internet search engines with approximately 608 MB of data, the study measured the occurrences of the twenty terms. The selected words are important in library cataloging, for some are prescribed abbreviations in metadata content standards. The study found that in eight of the ten word pairs users preferred to search words' full spellings over the abbreviations, often by a high margin.

Item type: Journal article (Paginated)
Keywords: abbreviations, cataloging, content standards, online searching
Subjects: I. Information treatment for information services > IA. Cataloging, bibliographic control.
I. Information treatment for information services > IE. Data and metadata structures.
Depositing user: Jeffrey Beall
Date deposited: 03 Jan 2012
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 12:20
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16435

References

1. Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR., and American Library Association, Anglo-American cataloguing rules. 2nd ed. (Washington: Library of Congress, 2002).

2. Library of Congress, Library of Congress rule interpretations, Appendix B-9. (Washington, Library of Congress, Cataloging Distribution Service). Loose-leaf, examined April 4, 2011.

3. Library of Congress, "Library of Congress will not change "dept." to "department" at this time". 1/3/11.

http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/department.html

4. Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, Resource description & access: RDA. (Chicago: American Library Association, 2010).

5. Jeffrey Beall, "The Weaknesses of Full-Text Searching," Journal of Academic Librarianship 34, no. 5 (2008): 438-444.

6. Terada, Akira, Takenobu Tokunaga, and Hozumi Tanaka. "Automatic Expansion of Abbreviations by Using Context and Character Information," Information Processing & Management 40, no. 1 (2004): 31.

7. Bernard J. Jansen, Amanda Spink, and Tefko Saracevic, "Real Life, Real Users, and Real Needs: A Study and Analysis of User Queries on the Web," Information Processing & Management 36, no. 2 (2000): 207.

8. Rob Young, "AlltheWeb search closes its doors," Search Engine Journal, April 5, 2011. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/alltheweb-search-closes-its-doors/29029/

9. Bernard J. Jansen and Amanda Spink, "An Analysis of Web Searching by European AlltheWeb.com Users," Information Processing & Management 41, no. 2 (2005): 361-381.

10. Bernard J. Jansen, "The Methodology of Search Log Analysis," in Handbook of Research on Web log Analysis (Hershey, PA: Idea Group Inc., 2008), 99-121.

11. Ibid, p. 101.


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