I've put together my first hack using pewbot — suggestions based on an individual's loan history. By running a user's loan history against the "also borrowed" database, it's possible to build a list of titles that should be of interest to that borrower. For example, if a student had borrowed the following 4 IT books: [...]
Posts from ‘February, 2006’
IE7 beta 2 and OpenSearch Autodiscovery
I'm on holiday this week, so it's giving me a chance to catch up on things. I bit the bullet last night and installed IE7 beta 2 on my laptop — partly to see if all of our library web sites work okay, but mostly to see how it handles RSS and OpenSearch. After a [...]
say hi to "pewbot"!
I've knocked together a web service front end for our "people who borrowed this, borrowed that…" data. For want of a better name, I've christened it "pewbot" (people who borrowed this). To use the pewbot service, call it using a URL in the format: http://webcat.hud.ac.uk:4128/pewbot/[ISBN] …where ISBN is a 10 digit ISBN (sorry – no [...]
Live OPAC search terms display
Another shameless hack inspired by the "Making Visible the Invisible" at SPL. I've tweaked HIP to cache keyword search terms and then put together a couple of pages that display successful searches (in tasteful shades of purple and lilac) and failed searches (in gruesome greens). IE has a nice CSS blur, so I've coupled that [...]
Dewey DNA Profile your checkouts
It has come to my attention that we have a large number of items being removed from our shelves. Whoever is doing this is being extremely clever by not removing too many from any one shelf. I have long harboured suspicions that this is in some way related to all of those people who keep [...]
Curse you Superpatron!
It's way past my bedtime, but the Ann Arbor Superpatron has been planting ideas in my head again… Recently Checked Out Books feed (in RSS or otherwise) I've not built a feed, but I have come up with these two representations of the most recent check outs (click for larger versions): 1) The last 30 [...]
A Perfect Library 2.0 Day
Just relaxing with a glass of wine after a very very Library 2.0 day With a lot of help from Iman Moradi (blog/flickr), we ran an introduction to Library 2.0 for members of our Subject Teams and Tech Services this afternoon. Then, after a coffee break, we watched the SirsiDynix Institute Weblogs & Libraries: Communication, [...]
"Did You Mean?" – part 2
I've been keeping an eye on the search terms and suggestions over the last few days and I noticed that we're getting quite a few people getting failed keyword searches simply because there's nothing that matches the term. In particular, we've got a lot of students searching for diuretics. As there's no matches found, the [...]