"Self-plagiarism is style"

Given how quiet he's been of late, I should have known John Blyberg was up to no good…

AADL.org Goes Social

I'm so envious that John is given the time to do all this by his management — I always seem to end up doing my coding during lunch breaks or at weekends — and I would kill a box full of cute kittens with my bare hands to be able to take on a project like this!

I was going to announce this week that Huddersfield are going live with user comments on the OPAC, but I kinda feel like an embarrassed fanboy now (mental note to self: "always announce things before John does, otherwise it just looks like you're copying him!").

One of the reasons for wanting comments is that our librarians are intrigued by some of the ratings our students have been giving items on the OPAC.  For example, this new book on RFID was given a rating within a couple of hours of being placed on the shelf and no one has borrowed it yet — so, had the user already bought the book… was it a member of staff wanting to recommend the book to students… was it someone just seeing how the ratings work by picking a random book?

It'll be interesting to see if the loan frequency for highly rated books goes up or just stays the same.

It's really cool to see that John has released the code for SOPAC.  I've thought of doing this for our OPAC tweaks, but wasn't sure how useful it would be — much of it relies on a MySQL database for storing data outside of the library management system.  Having said that, if anyone is interested in any of the things I've done, just give me a shout as I'm more than happy to share code.

Now, if I could just survive on 3 hours of sleep per night, I might have time to play catch up with AADL!

Just spotted "Asking Non-Users Why They Don't Use the Library" (LISNews):

From the Newtown (CT) Bee, C.H. Booth Library is looking for opinions about the library from an unlikely source: the people who do not use it. As part of a study for long-range planning at the library, made possible through a $9,000 grant awarded in 2006 by the Connecticut State Library, consultants Kevin McCarthy, director of Perrot Library in Old Greenwich and Christine Bradley, Connecticut Library Consortium executive director, have created a survey for local residents. To date, more than 300 surveys have been returned, a return rate that Mr McCarthy said at a meeting January 9 is very good.

At Huddersfield, we've been busy trawling our usage stats — firstly for our initial Equality Impact Assessment of opening hours, and more recently an analysis of non and low usage by staff and students.

We've only done an quick overview of non-usage (specifically usage of electronic resources, library borrowing, and number of visits to the library), but it's thrown up some interesting trends such as:

1) Art & Design Students — only 20% of them regularly use our electronic resources, but (relatively speaking) they are heavy users of the library (visits and borrowing)

2) the older you are (apparently we're not allowed to say "Mature Students" anymore), the less likely you are to use the library and it's facilities — the drop off rate is fairly alarming, especially as we have a large number of students who didn't come to us straight from doing their A Levels

3) female students are more likely to borrow books than males, but are less likely to make use of the library outside of the normal 9-5 opening hours

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