Retrieval effectiveness of enhanced bibliographic records

OCLC recently completed a research project to measure the contribution to retrieval effectiveness of adding abstracts and tables of contents to bibliographic records. The most accepted evaluation measurements in information retrieval research are recall and precision. Recall is the percentage of relevant documents in a collection that are retrieved for some query. Precision is the percentage of retrieved documents that are relevant. The Findings indicate that the addition of content‐bearing information in bibliographic records will improve the overall retrieval effectiveness of library catalogs. However, the improvement is primarily in terms of recall. Precision will suffer as more content‐bearing information is added to records.