Just spotted that Revish are gearing up for launching at the end of March 🙂
On the blog, Dan mentions that the site will provide APIs for getting at the data and I can’t wait to see if we can do anything with that data in our OPAC.
I quietly flicked on the ability to add reviews and comment to our OPAC last week, but we’ve yet to have our first student generated comment. This has slightly surprised me (i.e. made my right eyebrow rise by about 3mm) as we’ve already had several hundred book ratings added in the last few weeks. However, adding a rating doesn’t require you to login but adding a comment does (at the request of our Librarians).
If we don’t get any bites soon, I’ll probably tweak the code to allow anonymous comments. These will need to be fully moderated, as it seems these days that any HTML <form> on a public web page will attract spam 🙁
However, it does raise some interesting questions:
- Is having to login to post comments too much of a barrier?
- Are public library users (e.g. those at AADL) more likely to post comments/reviews than students at an academic library?
- What motivates someone to write a review/comment?
- Have I finally managed to code an OPAC tweak that no-one will use?
- Did I leave the iron on?
The API will be experimental at launch, so I’ll be really interested to hear how you find it and what changes would make it more usable.