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?

Dave Pattern’s HotStuff 2.0 blog analyses more than 800 ‘biblioblogs’ in an attempt to discover new and/or interesting topics…

“Just for fun, every day the last 3 blog posts from each blog are analysed to give a “Hot or Not” score. Points are gained for using words that haven’t been used frequently in the past, but lost for using words that are declining in popularity.”

Today, the L&LR staff blog is…
loading…

The University of Huddersfield have made their circulation usage and recommendation data free and reusable for the benefit of other libraries. Library systems manager, Dave Pattern, envisions a “book recommendation service that makes Amazon’s look amateurish”, made possible through more and more libraries doing the same.

Dave asks:

“whether or not you can augment this with data from your own library. If you can’t, I want to know what the barriers to sharing are. Then I want to know how we can break down those barriers.”

I promised to turn my as-it-happened notes from last week’s Mashed Library event into a proper, readable account of the day. A few other attendees have already written up their respective ‘takes’, including Tony Hirst, Paul Walk, Jo Alcock and organiser Owen Stephens, to whom credit is due.

Me, looking wide-eyed at Mashed Library '08. Photo by Dave Pattern.

Here’s my effort…

The day started interestingly enough, spotting Red Kites from the window of the train on the way down to London. Once I’d located Birkbeck College and the room under the library which was to be the venue for the day, it was straight on to connecting to Birkbeck’s e wireless network (the first challenge!).

This was more of an “unconference” than a traditional, speaker-driven event, with everyone tapping away at their laptops and nipping across the room to compare notes (and to get more coffee – the day’s catering was excellent!) throughout.

The first demo was from Rob Styles from Talis, who gave a quick explanation of some of the possibilities of their Talis Platform for searching and “augmenting” library (and other) data – a Harry Potter-themed example (Hogwarts’ finest kept cropping up through the day, which perhaps gives you an insight into the reading habits of systems-librarian types?) of a search of Talis’ test bib. data store created an RSS feed which was then ‘dipped’ (‘augmented’) with book cover images from another data store.

I certainly think we should take a look at Talis Platform and consider joining to their development network. I’ve already signed up to their mailing list / Google Group.

Some useful links:

• About Talis Platform
• Talis Platform developers’ wiki
• UK Bibliographic Store

Next, Tony Hirst from the OU ran through a number of freely available mashup-inspiring tools that can inspire people who “aren’t happy on the command line” (i.e. normal library workers!) to play with library data. Tony knocked together a series of lightning mashups, retrieving and presenting book cover images and Amazon reviews for a given ISBN, using a number of sites including:

• Amazon Web Services Made Simple
• Google Docs – spreadsheets can be used to scrape HTML pages and manipulate the data using familiar cell/formula operations
• Yahoo Pipes and the similar pipes.deri.org
• ThingISBN

I’ve already started mucking around with Yahoo Pipes to repurpose the data that’s locked up within services such as the A-to-Z; to create bespoke combined blog feeds for my own use, and (tentatively) on the XML output of HiP. I don’t doubt there’s more we could do (particularly involving the readily-available book-cover image collections that are out there), but as with a lot of this 2.0 stuff, it’s where to start?

Timm-Martin Siewert from Ex Libris was next up, demo-ing EL Commons, their rough equivalent to the Talis Platform – with the important difference that, at the minute, access is restricted to Ex Libris customers only. EL Commons provides usable APIs for various EL services, including Primo, Metalib, Aleph, etc. Timm was closely followed by Mark Allcock of OCLC, who showed a number of that organisation’s developer tools, including the WorldCat Developers’ Network.

I was impressed (and slightly overwhelmed!) by the range and number of OCLC’s reusable services which Mark mentioned, including registries of copyright information, journal ISSN history, and more. Some are restricted to OCLC members (although the Developers’ Network is not), but others are open to all:

• WorldCat Affiliate Services (not restricted to OCLC members)

Verdict – merits further investigation.

If your head is beginning to swim at this point, you’ve about reached the stage that I was at by now!

Aaaaaaaagh: code!!!!! Photo by Dave Pattern.

Last up before lunch was Ashley Sanders, a programmer at MIMAS. He spoke briefly and tantalisingly about some significant developments on the horizon for both COPAC and ZETOC, including better persistence of searches (presumably so they could be used in RSS feeds etc.) and a “modify record” tool that may be opened up to the community on the live service[s], once the question of authentication can be sorted.

Gratefully, on my part, we broke for lunch* (which was very good, again).

There were a number of interesting chats going on. In particular, around the OCLC’s “powergrab” (not my words!) of reuse-rights relating to catalogue records which it provides (a debate I’ve been following with mild interest) vs. a more “free”, creative-commons-Web2.0-hippy approach to making bibliographic data available for sharing. It was getting quite heated at one point (in a polite, librarianly way, of course).

I got more coffee.

The next bit of the day was the bit I struggled with most. Perhaps I’ve been conditioned to crave structure(!), but as people milled around, discussing ideas and working in small groups, I started to feel a bit on the periphery. As it was, I collared Rob Talis and got him to explain (patiently… and patiently over again…) how Talis Platform might be used in practice. After I’d asked a few daft questions it started to become a bit clearer (Rob – if you’re reading this, that’s not any reflection on your explanation, only on the time it takes for new ideas to sink in to my brain). At the time, I wrote:

“hadn’t realised this was entirely free (as developer) and unconnected to Talis LMS. I’m suffering from library-terminology disjoint syndrome at this point – different language / terms of reference.”

As with all of this stuff, I’m convinced you can only start to expose the value by getting stuck in and trying things out. Library2.0-in-theory doesn’t work.

My sanity was restored considerably at this point by Dave Pattern, who came over for a chat, and by the cakes and scones that started to appear (with more coffee). Dave and I talked about OPAC-wrapper / social-discovery-layer and metasearch applications (much, much more of which later…), the gathering and intelligent use of statistics, and Dave’s valuable tweaks and improvements to HiP.

My tags as I blogged on the day. Photo by Dave Pattern.

Credit also due to Dave for his photos, some of which I’ve used here.

The day wound up with one last presentation: this time from Paul Bevan, of the National Library of Wales. His was a talk I could identify with! Themes relating to geographic isolation (of Aberystwyth); a shift to virtual rather than physical visits to the library; institutional ‘buy-in’ and acceptance of the use of free 3rd-party social media applications; accessibility and the differing needs of different groups of users.

• This isn’t the exact presentation that Paul gave on the day, but it contains some of the same slides. It’s well worth a quick look.

Finally, Owen got everyone in the room to shout out what they’d been working on through the day. I admitted that I was nervous about the idea that I was meant to have achieved something by the end of the day (ha, ha) and that I didn’t really have anything to show. Others had been working on some really interesting ideas, including lots of use of Yahoo Pipes to bring together information from Amazon, Wikipedia, Talis Platform et al., and a couple looking at deriving geodata from MARC geographic name headings, to display catalogue records (e.g. for items relating to a particular town or city) via a map interface.

Incidentally, I had my first real ‘Mashed’ idea on the train on the way home. I’m working on something quite interesting, and if it looks as if it’s got legs, I’ll post it here.

This was a fantastic day in many ways, with 1,000 ideas a second being generated. I did find it slightly frustrating… I just need time and a quiet room to get my brain around this kind of thing, and I felt that 80% was passing me by. The challenge, I think, for L&LR, will be to identify which services and techniques have real potential for sharpening up our own service, and putting appropriate time aside to develop them properly. Otherwise, I fear, it’ll ever be seen as a slightly eccentric hobby (“You do what with pipes!?”)…

Last set of links:

• Mashed Library ‘08 – Ning (social networking) site
• Google Alerts RSS feed
• Facebook site I set up after the event

I’ll certainly be looking forward to Mashed Library ‘09, and if possible I think two or three of us should go next time.

Paul

—–

*No, I don’t know why I call it “lunch” at a conference, when it’s “dinner” in all other situations.

Chris L. and I have made a couple of changes to the way e-book links work on the public catalogue.

I’ve put a message on the public blog about the most obvious difference – MyiLibrary titles now open up in a new browser window – this seemed to be something that annoyed a lot of users (at least – a few Holbeach students complained about it…) because they couldn’t get back to the catalogue using the ‘back’ arrow.

Horizon now also handles the Athens authentication from MARC 856 $u in a slightly different way. We’ve made that change so that we can get the MARC records for the new ebrary e-books onto Horizon with the minimum of fuss, but it shouldn’t affect what users see when they log in to MyiLibrary (or ebrary) via HiP.

(You might spot that, since the change, links ro existing MyiLibrary titles in 856 are getting a double-dose of Athens authentication… this doesn’t seem to cause a problem [cue emails from Eduserv telling me why it's a terrible idea!] and Chris, Di, Bev, Jill and I will have a little project after Christmas to tidy up the existing MyiLibrary MARC records, to bring them in line with the newer ebrary records, and to put a stop to the duplicated Athens authentication within the links.)

I have to give credit here to Dave Pattern @ Huddersfield, who pointed the way forward to do this within Horizon(!) when we were chatting in London a week or so ago. Thanks Dave; works a treat!

I’m in here a couple of times, looking bemused. These were mostly taken by Dave Pattern (Huddersfield) and are on flickr.

#flickr_badge_source_txt {padding:0; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif; color:#666666;}
#flickr_badge_icon {display:block !important; margin:0 !important; border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0) !important;}
#flickr_icon_td {padding:0 5px 0 0 !important;}
.flickr_badge_image {text-align:center !important;}
.flickr_badge_image img {border: 1px solid black !important;}
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper {width:150px;}
#flickr_www {display:block; text-align:center; padding:0 10px 0 10px !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#3993ff !important;}
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:hover,
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:link,
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:active,
#flickr_badge_uber_wrapper a:visited {text-decoration:none !important; background:inherit !important;color:#3993ff;}
#flickr_badge_wrapper {background-color:#ffffff;border: solid 1px #000000}
#flickr_badge_source {padding:0 !important; font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif !important; color:#666666 !important;}

Google have launched an API for their Book Search, and Dave Pattern is already wondering how to nail it to his OPAC…

Paul

Dave Pattern, systems librarian at Huddersfield (whose blog I follow religiously) has just posted about how he’s potentially saving his university thousands of pounds a year and at the same time keeping Huddersfield green by replacing their ’beige boxes’ with low-energy-use OPACs.

Paul (taking a break from late-night MSc work!)