If we build it, will they come? Recommendations and WorldCat

This paper reports on a collaborative research project currently underway between the University of Sheffield's Information School and OCLC, the goal of which is to produce a recommender system for WorldCat.org – the publically accessible aggregated catalogue of the holdings of OCLC's member libraries. It highlights two of the key issues facing recommender systems design in the library domain: 1) Trust: users' trust both in the system itself and in collaboratively generated suggestions; and 2) Context: the difficulties of a system adapting to the huge range of information‐seeking contexts that accompany a diverse user base. The paper describes how future qualitative and quantitative research will attempt to address these issues, and produce a system that best serves users of WorldCat.org . It is hoped that as well as contributing to recommender systems research in general, the results of this project will help inform debates relating to the interaction between users and systems in a library context.