Blyberg Rocks!

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?
rfidbook
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!