http://vimeo.com/3289718

i don't think so… hmmm

Though I did track down one person who was borrowning the same books (not sure I remmeber how, tho…?)

I suspect that making borrowing history portable is something we ought to do anyway – it is their data after all.

If we take the BSC Applied Criminology as the starting point again, you can now see that students on that course have borrowed 2,747 titles. The largest overlap is with the BSC Behavioural Sciences course (HB100) course, whose students borrowed 1,629 of those 2,747 books. If you click on the 1629 link, you can see the common books between both courses.

I can't decide what the best method of ranking the common books should be, so I've gone with an ordering where similar levels of borrowing rank higher. The two figures in brackets show the number of times the book was borrowed on each course.

Where the borrowing figure was low on either course, the book won't get shown. Therefore, you might come across occasional "sorry – not enough overlap" messages. That means there was borrowing of common titles, but not by enough students to make it significant.

Not surprisingly, some of the common books aren't subject specific (e.g. books on how to write a dissertation or carry out research). Also, you'll probably come across items of equipment that the library lends out (dictaphones, digital cameras, etc).

Looking through the overlapping titles, it seems to be throwing out some useful data. For example, here's the overlap between MA Victorian Studies and BSC Criminology…

1) Prostitution and victorian society: women, class and the state
2) Prostitution: prevention and reform in England, 1860-1914
3) The reform of prisoners 1830-1900
4) Reconstructing the criminal: culture, law, and policy in England, 1830-1914

…you could imagine that would be times on each course where it might be beneficial to bring together both sets of students.

Re: Legal Studies/Chemical Sciences — some of the courses might have low borrowing figures (maybe only run for a single year with a small number of students), so could give higher percentage overlaps. If you click thru to the SC100 course, you'll spot that BL420 legal course doesn't appear. I'm only showing the top 50 matches, so the overlap must be lower than 3.1%. I'll get the code tweaked today to show what the book titles that were common to both groups were. Although the number of books in common will be the same, the percentages are relative to the total number of books borrowed by the students on that course.

Tony — borrowing after & before is something I've been pondering off and on for a while now. Back in 2006, I was thinking along the lines of lending paths: by analysing the data, you can make an educated guess as what the best book to borrow afterwards (or before) would be. If you extrapolate that, you get a path of books. The idea that you could hold a book in your hand and then predict the future kinda appealed to me!!! At the moment, we're using that data to make a personalised "we think you might be interested in…" recommendation when someone logs into the OPAC — by looking at the last few books they borrowed, what were the books that are most usually borrowed afterwards.

Another possible use is for if you picked up a book on a topic and, after flicking through it, decided it looked a little too advanced. Can we combine the usage data with something like Dewey or LCSH to give a precursor recommendation? For example, you've picked up "Advanced Java" so the code might recommend you start with "Java for Dummies".

Data Protection is definitely an issue here, so I'd definitely see this an "opt-in". Wouldn't it be great if there was a link between a user's library account ID and their Facebook ID? As well as being able to tap into their Facebook network of friends, the library might be able to begin recommending new friends.

In terms of tracking civil unrest, direct action books, etc, maybe we need to approach the problem from a US perspective. In order for a US library to begin tracking circulation history, they would need a way of anonymising the borrower whilst still assigning an ID (so that future transactions by that borrower can be linked together). Things like salted MD5 hashes spring to mind. Of course, there's a whole other issue as to why someone would borrow those books — am I planning a terrorist outrage or (more likely) am I conducting research into the topic?

We do have "in house" library analytics — it's a more granular version of the public stats that we include in the OPAC (e.g. Sociology by Giddens (5th ed)) that includes loans per course. It had never occurred to me before that the course leaders would find that data useful (d'oh!)

1) aggregated data is nice – finding courses that overlap in terms of book loans could be fed back to course leaders;

2) aggregated loans info gives you a hook into relevance marketing (maybe?!), e.g. on Amazon, or on OER sites that reference books in your loans profiles. Amazon "people who bough" data maybe gives you insight to precursor books? (Hmmm, or does Amazon 'people who bought' only suggest boooks that were bought AFTER the book you're looking at);

3) loans lists are not just lists – they are ORDERED lists. So you can maybe suggest "people who borrowed this usually borrowed that before it". This is fraught with issues of course; e.g. the "that" book might be crap (and so needs removing from reading lists?).

4) do you offer course leaders 'library analytics" back, e.g. reports showing how often (and when) books on course recommended reading lists are borrowed (again, just the aggregated data would be fine here).

I resorted to putting pieces of paper in the books along the lines of: "Hi, I'm currently doing a PhD on blah, and I couldn't help noticing you're after this book too. Fancy a chat sometime?" and sometimes scribbled contact details in the inside cover of the book in pencil: "people who borrowed this book – want to chat about it?", giving my email address…

Chatting to Library folk over the years, I think I understand why they don't want to share who's borrowing books, and maybe why they don't even want to know. They (you) lay themselves open to becoming thought police…

Btw, could you run a search for me on who's borrowing fundamentalist politic, civil unrest and direct action books…? Ta.

(Btw 2, I'm with you on thinking the "topic buddy" service is a good one, just relaying one of the arguments I've heard against it… Maybe having an opt-in pathway, and giving users control via a personal a/c page would be one way round to accommodate Data Protection and privacy concerns?)