Overview of the INEX 2014 Social Book Search Track

The goal of the INEX 2014 Social Book Search Track is to evaluate approaches for supporting users in searching collections of books based on book metadata and associated user-generated content. The track investigates the complex nature of relevance in book search and the role of traditional and user-generated book metadata in retrieval. We extended last year’s investigation into the nature of book suggestions from the LibraryThing forums and how they compare to book relevance judgements. Participants were encouraged to incorporate rich user profiles of both topic creators and other LibraryThing users to explore the relative value of recommendation and retrieval paradigms for book search. We found further support that such suggestions are a valuable alternative to traditional test collections that are based on top-k pooling and editorial relevance judgements.