Host: Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics (SOFT)
This paper aims at improving the usability of the book search engine for children: "Adventure in the Sea of Books", which we developed for "International Institute for Children's Literature, Osaka" in 2002. This book search engine is equipped with the content with which children can enjoy searching for books through the Internet. Each book registered in the library system is given some keywords relating to its outline or contents, along with its basic bibliographic data. These keywords enable library users to search for books by the free words with which they come up, as well as by book titles or authors. However, in order to write the outlines of books and assign keywords to them, librarians first have to read books one by one and select suitable ones for children. In that study, we confined our analysis to the bibliographic data of "picture books" installed in "Adventure in the Sea of Books". We classified the keywords assigned to each picture book into influencing ones and influenced ones, and examined the relationship between them. In this paper, we confine our analysis to the bibliographic data of "storybooks" installed in "Adventure in the Sea of Books". We examine the assigned keywords and relationship between them, and see if there is any difference between "picture books" and "storybooks" based on our previous study. Moreover, we investigate whether there is any difference in the keywords and their relationship when we classify the "storybooks" into those for the lower grades, for the third and fourth grades, and for the upper grades. We hope that this study will help to reduce librarians' workload of assigning keywords to books by hand.
