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A Fuzzy Recommender System for Public Library Catalogs

Recommendation engines are one of the “discovery” products built into integrated library systems. These are a subclass of enterprise systems designed specifically for public and research libraries that incorporate an electronic card catalogue, circulation and inventory management, personnel and payroll systems, etc. The system vendors offer customizations for different contexts of specific library systems, but cannot create a bespoke solution for every customer. Our partner, an Edmonton‐area company, is filling this gap for a consortium of rural libraries in Alberta by creating a mobile app that interfaces with their electronic card catalog. Rural libraries are generally smaller than major urban public libraries, meaning that their holdings are limited overall, and within any given genre. This poses a severe problem for traditional collaborative‐filtering recommender algorithms, as the item sets for recommendations are limited by supply rather than by readers’ interests. The library's relatively small clientele also limits the item sets available for comparison. To deal with this ongoing “cold‐start” problem, we propose a hybridization of collaborative filtering with a content filter using a fuzzy taste vector. Experiments on two benchmark recommender data sets show that this approach is at least as accurate as existing fuzzy recommenders and is particularly effective on sparse data sets.