To go into a little more detail about what we're hoping to achieve, here's the project spec. Primarily, we'll be creating a new library portal (currently dubbed "MyLibrary") that will provide a bespoke view of key library services and will include the following planned functionality: the ability to view items on loan and renew them, [...]
Posts under ‘Library Stuff’
Operation Dump the OPAC
If you follow me on Twitter (@daveyp), you'll probably know already that we're about to take the plunge and retire our OPAC in favour of using Summon. There are a few drivers behind this, including: the OPAC's search facility is crude by modern standards and it's difficult to refine a search it looks like the [...]
The Magic Microphone and the Horrible Headphones
A while back, I had a daft idea to try and use all of the library circulation and graduate attainment data to pinpoint which books were the ones most likely to be borrowed by high achieving students, as I thought it might be fun to highlight those on the OPAC — after all, if you [...]
Please give generously…
The Boolean Sanctuary is a UK charity run by librarians, working to protect neglected & homeless Boolean Operators. Please give generously. — Dave Pattern (@daveyp) April 28, 2012 … The Boolean Sanctuary will never put a healthy Boolean Operator to sleep. If you would like to adopt AND, NOT and/or OR, please call us. — [...]
"Library search tools. Could we make them harder to use?"
Everyone now and then you come across a blog post that really resonsates and this is one: "Library search tools. Could we make them harder to use?" by @carolgauld. I was being cheeky when I proposed Dave's Law, but this is something that we seriously need to get a grip on… My daughter now thinks, [...]
A week on Summon (revisited)
After yesterday's blog post, I thought I'd have a go at narrowing down my definition of a "separate search". If a user enters some search terms, and then uses 2 facets to refine the search before clicking on a result, I was classing that as 3 separate searches — what niggled me overnight was that [...]
A week on Summon
[ update: slightly revised stats are available here! ] We've just started collecting in-depth data about how students are searching Summon (keywords entered, facets selected, etc) and I thought some of you might be interested in an early analysis from the last 7 days (just under 40,000 separate searches by 2,807 students)… On average, students [...]
Dave's Law
I'd love to have a law named after me, so here goes: Dave's Law users should not have to become mini-librarians in order to use the library If you ever find yourself needing to invoke Dave's Law, please let me know
Relevancy Rules
Inspired by the Summon result click stats that Matthew Reidsma has extracted (and, to be honest, I find myself being regularly inspired by what Matthew's doing!), I've started tracking the clicks on our Summon instance too. Anyone who's had the misfortune to hear me present recently will know I've been waffling on about the importance [...]
Hacking Summon for Fun and Profit (part 1)
OK, I'll admit it, I've fallen in love with jQuery over the last 18 months I've ended up using quite a bit of jQuery in our new reading list software ("MyReading"), to add various bells and whistles, including dropping an "add to MyReading" option into the Summon interface. Like they say, "when you've got a [...]