Ray R. Larson
Ray R. Larson (1951-2017) was an American information retrieval system designer.
Life
Ray Reed Larson was born on November 6, 1951 in Fullerton, California. He received a BA in English and comparative literature in 1974 and a MS in library science at California State University, Fullerton and worked at the Fullerton public library. He received a Graduate Certificate in Library Automation and Information Science in 1979 and a PhD in 1986 at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Library and Information Studies. His dissertation, entitled “Workload Characteristics and Computer System Utilization in Online Library Catalogs,” examined the optimal balancing of workload on the computer and effort by the human searcher. It drew on his work on the MELVYL online library catalog.
In 1984 he joined the faculty of Berkeley's School of Library and Information Studies (later the School of Information) until he retired as emeritus professor in 2016.
After working on the development of University of California MELVYL union catalog, he spent the rest of his life developing an evolving system that he named CHESHIRE, an acronym for California Hybrid Extended SMART for Hypertext and Information Retrieval Experimentation. This work was supported by several grants and long-term collaborations with Michael K. Buckland, Fredric C. Gey, Robert Sanderson, Paul Watry and others.
A key component of his work was "classification clustering" which, when given a book title, would use probabilistic techniques to propose a Library of Congress Classification number. This approach was found to generalize to the creation of mappings between any pair of vocabularies for which training sets were available and so could serve as a rapid and very economical form of search term recommender service for use with unfamiliar vocabularies.
Larson was an active participant in several many conferences on the comparative evaluation of retrieval systems, including geographic information retrieval, cross-language information retrieval and structured XML retrieval using probabilistic methods. He died a few months after retirement on June 17, 2017.
Publications
- Between Scylla and Charybdis: Subject searching in the online catalog." In Advances in Librarianship 15 (1991): 175-236.
- [With others] "Mapping Entry Vocabulary to Unfamiliar Metadata Vocabularies." D-Lib Magazine 5, no. 1 (Jan 1999). [[1]]
- [With others] S"earch Across Different Media: Numeric Data Sets and Text Files." Information Technology and Libraries 25, no 4 (Dec 2006): 181-189. [[2]]
- [With others]. "Geographic Search: Catalogs, Gazetteers, and Maps." College & Research Libraries 68, no. 5 (Sept 2007): 376-387. [[3]]