ANALYSIS AND NEWS


CONTENT DISCOVERABILITY: SERENDIPITY AND SUPPORTING LESS EXPERIENCED USERS


At the Researcher to Reader conference, in London in February, Tom Beyer gave a talk on supporting serendipity in the content discovery process


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erendipity is an important element of platform functionality and navigation that particularly benefits less experienced users. The challenge that publishers, and us as platform hosts face, is how can we help those users that arrive at your site, but not at the piece of content that is exactly what they are looking for (if they even know what they are looking for)? You’ve seen it many times before in both scholarly publishing and in other market segments – typically we try to deliver the most relevant, valuable, alternate content through related links.


Related content links are judged on the


quality of the links, specifically: l Do they make sense in the context of the content that the user is currently on? and


l Do they truly provide a serendipitous experience?


Both of these criteria for link quality are important as it is entirely possible to provide extremely related links that are not particularly useful, e.g. in a book the most related links will be to other chapters in the same book but that is ultimately not really what the user is looking for.


There are also many ways of generating the related content links with two main efforts being around document relatedness on the one hand and user behaviour (people who read/downloaded this or read/downloaded that) on the other. Publishers have typically concentrated on document relatedness and have often invested significantly in semantic enrichment technologies to improve the quality of these links. Unfortunately, despite the large amount of time and effort that has gone into creating useful related content links, the end result in the platform has often been underwhelming. More often than not the links are hard to


22 Research Information APRIL/MAY 2016


find and decipher. This is fundamentally a UI problem although it may be exacerbated by a lack of necessary metadata.


So how do we provide more context to help the user quickly understand which links are most likely to provide the results they are looking for? The first solution is to simply improve the UI around the links by increasing their visibility on publication pages and labelling them explicitly, e.g. ‘related resources’ or ‘recommendations’. In addition, many publishers are starting to provide context for users on the reason for the link to be selected. For example, SpringerLink presents related links based on ‘similar concepts’ whereas SAGE describes providing related links based not only on ‘similar concepts’ but also managing


‘Innovation looks very different from different vantage points’


the relatedness by restricting the size of certain corpora in order to increase unexpected and, hopefully, more interesting discoveries. Publishers’ ‘browse’ interfaces frequently suffer many of the same interface problems that related links do. And on top of that, the need to create appropriate taxonomies and ontologies to organise the content is a significant and complex task. In each of these cases, sites end up providing lists of content with some minimal organisation and context. The question then becomes: are less experienced users well served with these interfaces, and if they are not, what could we do better?


I think that ultimately the answer to fully supporting users in serendipitous content discovery is to provide significantly more context and to provide editorially authored guides to the content. This approach is based on availability of subject matter experts to select content, put it in order, and provide both an overview of the entire set as well as introducing each item and putting it in context. Safari is exploring this idea with their Tutorials product and AAAS is doing something similar with their topic pages. Safari has built an entire user experience around Tutorials to allow users to monitor their progress as they move through each one.


The R2R event was held in London in February @researchinfo www.researchinformation.info


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