CHESHIRE-II - DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF A NEXT-GENERATION ONLINE CATALOG SYSTEM

The Cheshire II project is developing a next-generation online catalog and full-text information retrieval system using advanced IR techniqu es. This system is being deployed in a working library environment and its use and acceptance by local library patrons and remote network us ers are being evaluated. The Cheshire II system was designed to overco me twin problems of topical searching in online catalogs, search failu re and information overload. The system incorporates a client/server a rchitecture with implementations of current information retrieval stan dards including 239.50 and SGML. The Cheshire II system is being made available for public use in the UC Berkeley Astronomy-Mathematics-Stat istics Library (a medium-scale academic branch library, circa 75,000 v olumes) using modern workstations, and to the national mathematics res earch community via network access. Use and acceptance of the system a nd its features will be evaluated using transaction monitoring and que stionnaires. This paper will describe the system architecture and the user evaluation tools.