Whilst chatting to one of the delegates at yesterday's "Gaining business intelligence from user activity data" event (my Powerpoint slides can be grabbed from here) about non & low-usage of library services/resources, I began wondering how that relates to final grades. In the previous blog post, we've seen that there appears to be evidence of [...]
Posts under ‘Usage Data’
Library usage and final grades
It's high time I started blogging again, so let's start off with something that my colleagues in the library have been talking about at recent conferences — the link between the usage of library services and the final academic grades achieved by students. As a bit of background to this, it's probably worth mentioning that [...]
Simple API for JISC MOSAIC Project Developer Competition data
For those of you interested in the developer competition being run by the JISC MOSAIC Project, I've put together a quick & dirty API for the available data sets. If it's easier for you, you can use this API to develop your competition entry rather than working with the entire downloaded data set. edit (31/Jul/2009): [...]
Peaks and troughs in borrowing
A good couple of years ago, I blogged about "lending paths", but we've not really progressed things any further since then. I still like the idea that you can somehow predict books that people might/should borrow and also when you might get a sudden rush of demand on a particular title. Anyway, whilst heading back [...]
Web service for the free book usage data
I've been meaning to get around to adding a web service front end on to the book usage data that we released in December for ages. So, better late than never, here it is! It's not the fastest bit of code I've ever written, but (if there's enough interest) I could speed it up. The [...]
Keyword search data
We've been logging all keyword searches on our OPAC for nearly 3 years and now have details for over 3 million searches. Just in case the data is of any use to anyone, I've uploaded an aggregated XML version to our web server: http://library.hud.ac.uk/data/keyworddata/ As with the usage data, we're putting it out there with [...]
Books that connect users
I thought it would be interesting to trawl the data and find out which books have been borrowed by the largest number of different courses within the university. I forget what the correct Graph Theory term is, but these are the books (nodes?) that connect together (edges?) the largest number of separate groups of students [...]
The impact of serendipity (part 2)
I promised I'd dig a bit deeper into the book data, so here goes! We have seven academic schools in the university, so I thought it would be interesting to see how the range of titles broke down by each school. As previously noted, the borrowing patterns seem to have changed at the end of [...]
A library dating service
In my UKSG presentation, I briefly touched on the need for library services (perhaps the OPAC, but perhaps not) to start joining users together in the same way that sites like Facebook do. In the same way that a "people who borrowed this, also borrowed…" service starts exposing the hidden links between items on shelves, [...]
The impact of book suggestions/recommendations?
Whilst finalising my presentation for the 2009 UKSG Conference in Torquay, I thought it would be interested to dig into the circulation data to see if there was any indication that our book recommendation/suggestion services (i.e. "people who borrowed this, also borrowed…" and "we think you might be interested in…") have had any impact on [...]