L&LR staff blog

Over the past year (and increasingly frantically over the past few weeks), I’ve been working to liberate a small amount of the Library’s recent book-circulation data, as part of a national project (“MOSAIC – Making Our Shared Activity Information Count”) investigating the possibilities around exploiting “user activity data” within university libraries.

I’m immensely relieved that we’ve finally managed to make some of our data public, under a Creative Commons licence, via the Repository at: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2164/

“The University of Lincoln collected one academic year’s worth of its own library book circulation data (“user activity data”) for the JISC-funded MOSAIC project, which set out to investigate the technical feasibility, service value and issues around exploiting user activity data. Data was collected for the period 1 September 2008 – 31 August 2009. Lincoln’s data was processed according to a data schema common to all participants in the MOSAIC project; any data that might be used to identify an individual library user was removed or anonymised.”

"Libraries as Books" by Dave & Bry (flickr)

The MOSAIC project (background: here and here) set out to collate book circulation and other library usage data – all homogenised and appropriately anonymised – from 9 separate universities; in order (in part) to demonstrate how the innovative use of that data could be used to add value to the library user experience.

Thanks are due to the MOSAIC project team (especially Helen Harrop for her patience and Dave Pattern for his guidance!), to colleagues in ICT for their recent invaluable assistance in getting at our data, and finally to everyone in L&LR who’s been involved – particularly to Chris Leach.

So, now the data’s out there… who’s going to make use of it?

The new on-line enquiry desk “tick sheet” has now been loaded on to the 3rd floor enquiry desk PC (thanks, Dave Masterson!). It is easy to use – every time you log on to the 3rd floor desk PC, a new desktop icon will be present which you simply double click on to open up the program. It stays open on the desktop until you log out again! whenever you have a query, simply click on the appropriate category, and it records it automatically. The program does not “minimize” completely, but does reduce in size.

Each “click” is recorded within the appropriate category on the Excel spreadsheet which sits behind the program, and from that we can get totals of each category, the time it was recorded, even who logged it!

It has been suggested that we start using the new facility from Monday 27 October, though if you have already started, it’’s not a problem!

Chris Leach