Dave – Page 22 – Self Plagiarism is Style

Library Refurbishment

The entrance floor of the University of Huddersfield Library has been closed all summer for a major refurbishment. Today, we opened the doors to the “Student Centre” (the new name for the entrance floor) in time for Welcome Weekend and the start of Fresher’s Week.
Apart from the refurbishment, the new Student Centre hosts service points for the various Student Services which were previously housed elsewhere in the Central Services Building. This is great news for our students, as the majority of the services they require to support them during their studies are now in one place.
Even more exciting (for me, anyway!) — we get delivery of our new RFID book sorter on Monday morning 🙂
You can see all of the images from this morning in this Flickr set (or as a slideshow). Here are some of my favourites…

We’ve even managed to tweak our OPACs so that the screensaver matches the new colour scheme 🙂

Hitchcock blog

When I started this blog in 2005, it was primarily to support the Hitchcock site, which started up in 2003. The title of the blog (“Self-plagiarism is style”) being a quote from Hitchcock.
Two years on, the most popular posts seem to be those about libraries so I’ve decided to fork the blog — this one will continue to be library and personal posts, and a new blog will concentrate on the Hitchcock stuff: “It’s Only a Movie…”

NAG 2007 Conference workshop

I think I’ve just about recovered from my first NAG Conference, which was held this year at Keele University…
Ronald Milne takes a question from Ken Chad
A big “thank you” to everyone who came along to the “Web 2.0 – It’s Okay to Play” workshops and I hope it sparked one or two ideas that you might want to pursue!

Some of the photos I took are now on Flickr (I’ve used the tag “nag2007”).
The presentation is available to view or download at SlideShare: www.slideshare.net/daveyp/n-a-g2007
As promised, here’s those links for you to explore…
Continue reading “NAG 2007 Conference workshop”

Sunset over Huddersfield

Come the End of the World, I suspect the sky might look a little like it did this evening…

(more images)

Twittering the OPAC

I noticed that a few other people have been blogging about how they’re using Twitter within their own library, so here’s how I’ve been (ab)using my Twitter feed…
http://twitter.com/daveyp
Last year, I set up some data feeds from the library that our students could hook into for their projects. This data includes a file listing the keywords used in the last 50 searches on the OPAC and their frequency.
The file is also used to generate this keyword cloud (which ignores words with a frequency of only 1).
Anyway, after getting bored with manually updating Twitter myself, I decided to hook it into the keyword file. Every few minutes, an automated script checks the file for the most frequently used keyword(s) from recent searches, and sends it off to Twitter.
I’m not sure if it really serves any useful purpose, but it’s kinda fun to see a top-slice of what our users are searching for. Occasionally the keywords link together to make weird statements…

…so, the next time Twitter crashes, you can probably blame me 😀

Hitchcock — hatches and dispatches

Every now and then I post something to one of the Hitchcock groups on Yahoo about an interesting anniversary or birthday (e.g. yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Ingrid Bergman‘s death) …basically an excuse to raise a glass of something alcoholic and/or watch a Hitchcock film 😉
I’ve also been trying to keep track of Hitchcock collaborators who are still alive. As you can imagine, the list dwindles year by year, but 2007 has (touch wood) been fairly quiet.
Anyway, I did threaten to do something with the data one day, and here it is…
Number of births and deaths per year

The red profile is lower partly because sites such as IMDB don’t always know when someone has died (or if they are still alive). Some people might start in the movies, only to move on to another career and their death might not be widely reported in the press.
There are some interesting trends in the birth year (e.g. rises and falls over a 6 year cycle and occasional spikes).
Number of births and deaths per month

March and August are the most popular birth months, and (perhaps not surprisingly) December and January see the highest number of deaths.
Here’s the same data stretched to 100%…

Number of births per year (surviving collaborators)

The most common year of birth for surviving collaborators is 1936. The only film actor who was born in that year was Bruce Dern — all the rest were actors in the TV series.
The oldest surviving collaborator is the Art Director and Production Designer Robert F Boyle, and the youngest is actor Bill Mumy who went on to play the role of Lennier in “Babylon 5”.
The oldest actress is Frances Reid and the oldest actors include Kevin McCarthy and Norman Lloyd.
Notes
The data is based on anyone who has a biographical entry on the Hitchcock Wiki (which certainly isn’t everybody). This includes actors and cast/crew for films and television programs, as well as some of the people who’ve appeared in Hitchcock DVD documentaries.
For the “still alive” list, sometimes I’ve made a best guess — this is usually based on whether or not the IMDB shows them as still being active in film or television in the last couple of years, or if the site lists their current whereabouts.

Libraries, teenagers and 2.0?

I’m doing a short presentation at an event in Wolverhampton in October (“Inspiring the iGeneration – Web 2.0, teenagers and libraries”) and I’m on the hunt for fun examples of how libraries (especially public libraries) are using “2.0” to attract teenagers.
I’ve got a few examples, but I’d love to hear about things you’re doing at your own library (e.g. gaming evenings, web content creation, etc) or things that you know other libraries have done. Even if it’s not really “2.0”, but it’s worked well in getting those teenagers in, then again I’d like to hear about it. I’m also really struggling to find examples in the UK, so if you know of anything, please let me know!
There’s been quite a bit of negative discussion recently about teenagers and computers in libraries (e.g. they use them to play games rather than to do their homework, or spend all their time on MySpace/Facebook/etc). I’d be interested to hear your comments about the subject (either negative or positive).

Check out these trends

…sorry, but that was the best blog title I could come up with at 10pm after a long day 😉
In a previous post, I mentioned that the circulation figures were up for the year so far (when compared to 2006). That got me wondering what the long term trend was for items checked out. Unfortunately there are some sizeable gaps in the historical data (as stored on Horizon), otherwise I’d be able to go back as far as 1996.
Anyway, here’s how the number of check outs per month pans out since 2000…

…or if you prefer your lines to be smoother…

The CKO data for this year is in white.
There’s a marked change after 2002 in the period around May, and (if memory serves me right) the structure of our academic year changed in September 2002. The overall figures indicate that we had a slight decline around 2003, but it’s been climbing gradually since then. So, much as I’d love to take the glory for our increased CKOs this year, it’s probably just following the recent trend.
Finally, here’s the same graph, but adjusted for an “academic year” (Sep-Aug)…

Yay!

Just catching up with some of my unread Bloglines and this post over at Shhhh!! made me snigger into my morning coffee 🙂

Rock The Reference Desk

If you build it, they’ll come back for more!

I’m just busy putting together slides for some of the upcoming presentations and I thought it was about time I trawled through some of the OPAC usage stats to see if our students are still using some of the OPAC tweaks we’ve made.
The good news is that they are, and then some more!
First up, here’s the overall usage for 4 of the tweaks (May 2006 to July 2007):

At first glance, nothing too surprising — the overall trend follows the academic year, with the lull over summer.
What did leap out was the blue line (clicks on “people who borrowed this, also borrowed…” suggestions) — since this April, the usage has been higher than the “did you mean” spelling suggestions (red line). So, either our users have suddenly become better spellers, or they’re making much higher usage of the borrowing suggestions. If I was a betting man, I’d say it was the latter.
We’ve now got enough data to compare the same 3 months in 2006 and 2007 (May to July):

That second graph is why I’m sat here with a grin like a Cheshire Cat 😀
[update]
I’ve dug out the circulation stats for the same period and that re-inforces the statement that the students are making much higher usage of borrowing suggestions in 2007 than in 2006. You can see that the number of check outs (bold pink) pretty much matches the number of clicks on the “did you mean” spelling suggestions (red line in the first graph). Check outs have also risen in 2007 when compared to the same months in 2006.

Interestingly, I don’t think we’ve ever had a student go up to a member of staff and say “I’ve found the suggestions really useful” or “thank you for adding spell checking”. I wonder how many complaints we’d get it we turned the features off?