Consider a\u00a0catalog for a small public library\u00a0that features a way to sort search results by popularity. There are several ways to measure “popularity” of a book: circulations, hold requests, click-throughs in the catalog, downloads, patron-supplied ratings, place on bestseller lists, and so forth.<\/p>\n
But let’s do a little thought experiment: let’s use a random number generator to calculate popularity.<\/p>\n
However, the results will need to be plausible. It won’t do to have the catalog assert that the latest J.D. Robb book is gathering dust in the stacks. Conversely, the copy of 1959 edition of\u00a0The geology and paleontology of the Elk Mountain and Tabernacle Butte area, Wyoming\u00a0<\/em>that\u00a0was given\u00a0to the library right\u00a0after the last weeding is never going to be a doorbuster.<\/p>\n So let’s be clever and ensure that the 500 most circulated\u00a0titles in the collection retain\u00a0their expected popularity rating. Let’s also leave books that have never circulated alone in their dark corners, as well as those that have no cover images available. The rest, we leave to the tender mercies of the RNG.<\/p>\n What will happen? If patrons\u00a0use the\u00a0catalog’s popularity rankings, if they trust them \u2014 or at least are more likely to look at\u00a0whatever shows up near the top of search results \u2014 we might expect that the titles with an\u00a0artificial bump\u00a0from the\u00a0random number generator will circulate just a bit more often.<\/p>\n Of course,\u00a0testing that hypothesis by letting a RNG\u00a0skew search results in a real library catalog would be unethical.<\/p>\n But if one were clever enough to be subtle in one’s use of the RNG,\u00a0the patrons would have a hard time figuring out that something was amiss. \u00a0From the user’s point of view, a sufficiently advanced search engine is indistinguishable from a black box.<\/p>\n This suggests some interesting possibilities for the Evil\u00a0Librarian of Evil:<\/p>\n Don’t be the ELE.<\/p>\n But as you work to improve library catalogs…\u00a0take care not to become the ELE by accident.<\/p>\n\n
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