At the recent SummonCamp in New Orleans, there was a question about the local "Availability:" messages that appear in Summon for things like books, e.g. Availability: available, Huddersfield (Loan Collection Floor 6 – 2 wk loan) By default, Summon either scrapes your OPAC or makes use of an ILS/LMS API to get real time availability. [...]
Posts under ‘Library Stuff’
Relevancy ranking in Summon
Yesterday, Tim Fletcher tweeted me a question about Summon: How does Summon rank results? is there a logic? …it's not the kind of question that you can answer in 140 characters, but I quickly knocked off an email to Tim. This morning David F. Flanders suggested I should also blog the response. So, first of [...]
Hurricanes and shrimp po'boys (part 1)
I'm jetlagged (this is the first time I've had jetlag that feels like being drunk) and still coming down from an-ALA induced high, but here goes a blog post! I'm currently fortunate enough to be a member of the Serials Solutions Summon Advisory Board, and last week saw the fourth pre-ALA meeting, this time in [...]
EZproxy and Summon
I'll flesh out this blog post later on today, but just wanted to post some screenshots (partly as a rebuttal to Nicole's blog post "Some thoughts about (authentication) discovery aimed at librarians") to show how well EZproxy fits as the authentication layer between a discovery service (such as Summon) and journal articles on publisher sites. [...]
CILIP Cymru Conference
I'm journeying down to Llandrindod Wells tomorrow to give a presentation about usage data to the Welsh Libraries, Archives and Museums Conference (hashtag #cilipw11). I've been promised that there'll be real ale there You can grab a draft copy of my presentation ("If you want to get laid, go to college…") from here (15MB). The [...]
Are books becoming more important?
Being a shamistician, rather than a statistician, I'm not sure how much importance to attach to this, but I thought it was interesting enough to share! The JISC Library Impact Data Project has given us an opportunity to churn through our usage data again and, following on from the last blog post, we've been looking [...]
5 years of book loans and grades
I'm just starting to pull our data out for the JISC Library Impact Data Project and I thought it might be interesting to look at 5 years of grades and book loans. Unfortunately, our e-resource usage data and our library visits data only goes back as far as 2005, but our book loan data goes [...]
Sliding down the long tail
At a recent event in Edinburgh, I was asked about how we generate the "people who borrowed this, also borrowed…" suggestions in our OPAC and whether or not there are privacy issues with generating them. Last week, I popped over to Manchester for a meeting of the JISC funded SALT (Surfacing the Academic Long Tail), [...]
JISC Activity Data Programme
I'm chuffed to bits that the Library Impact Data bid that Huddersfield submitted, along with 7 project partner institutions, was one of the successful ones in the JISC Activity Data Programme and the project will kick off on Tuesday this week! … the aim of this project is to prove a statistically significant correlation between [...]
Course level journal article feed
Following on from the last blog post, I've done some coding to see how well (or not!) a course level new journal article feed might work. The process behind the code is… for a given course, identify the most frequently accessed journal titles use JournalTOCs to fetch the latest articles from each journal's RSS feed [...]