Social Book Search: The Impact of Professional and User-Generated Content on Book Suggestions

The Web and social media give us access to a wealth of information, not only different in quantity but also in character—traditional descriptions from professionals are now supplemented with user generated content. This challenges modern search systems based on the classical model of topical relevance and ad hoc search. We compare classical IR with social book search in the context of the LibraryThing discussion forums where members ask for book suggestions. This paper is an compressed version of [2].