Category: Horizon/HIP

The initial announcement has now gone out to SirsiDynix customers — the all singing, all dancing Horizon 8.0 will not receive a general release.
Instead SirsiDynix will concentrate their efforts on developing another new system (codenamed “Rome”) which will be built on the Unicorn architecture.

Oh boy…
Don’t you just hate it when someone tells you that something major is about to happen, but you really don’t want to repeat it because it might not be true and you’d just be spreading unfounded gossip. But, then again, it’s so absolutely huuuuuuge that you can’t find a hat big enough to keep it under? Anyway, something may (or may not) be about to happen that could rock your world.
Let’s sit back, fasten our seatbelts, and see what happens in the next 48 hours in LibraryLand…

I hate being reminded of how quickly time flies!
Nearly a year ago, I added a post about how five of our OPAC tweaks were being used:
1) “did you mean?” spell checker suggestions for failed searches (more info)
2) serendipity keyword suggestions for failed searches (more info)
3) “people who borrowed this also borrowed…” suggestions (more info)
4) books with similar subject headings (more info)
5) other editions of books (more info)
I left the logging running, so we now have 11 months worth of data to show usage — by “usage” I mean when a user actually clicked on one of the links displayed by the tweak.
Click any of the graphs to view the full sized version.
Usage by month

Being an academic site, usage of all library services varies by month — usage drops heavily during summer, and dips during Christmas and Easter.
You can easily see that “did you mean” and “people who borrowed this” are the most heavily used.
The “people who borrowed this” and the “similar subjects” tweaks are both ones that promote serendipity when browsing items — you’re viewing one book but are being given links to other relevant items.
Although the “serendipity keyword suggestions” is the least used feature (partly because it only appears under certain circumstances), it’s getting enough usage to justify the couple of hours coding it took.
Here’s a breakdown of the average number of daily clicks, along with the peak number of clicks each tweak has received in a single day…

Usage by day

It’ll be interesting to see if Tuesday is also the busiest day for other library services.
Usage by tweak

There’s almost a doubling in usage going on here from the “serendipity keywords” to the “did you mean”. I said it last time and I’ll say it again now — if you don’t have a spell checker on your OPAC, then you need to hire a web developer and add one a.s.a.p.!
Usage per hour

That odd little bump in usage around 5pm has smoothed out now.
Conclusion
Even with the least used tweaks, there’s more than enough usage to justify the development time, so I’m extremely happy with the graphs.
Assuming I don’t get run over by a bus, call back next year to find out if the usage has increased!

I’ve made something, but I’m not too sure what it really is or if it’s of any use what-so-ever!
I started playing around with the “relationships” code (briefly mentioned here) to see what would happen if you selected multiple books and ranked the aggregated suggestions by frequency of appearance.
For example, here are 4 O’Reilly books that I’ve selected. The code pulls in the list of suggestions for each book, then (underneath the line) displays the books that appear in all 4 lists, followed by the ones that are only common to 3 lists, then 2, then those that only appear in one of the lists (with up to 100 being displayed in total).
So, in theory, if I’d picked up those 4 books and was looking for a couple more to borrow, then “PHP & MySQL Web Development” and “HTML & XHTML” should be safe bets.
You can click on any of the books above the line to remove it from the selection. If you click on “HTML” and “Web Based Applications” books to remove them, then you should be left with the “PHP” and “MySQL” books — in that case, a book on e-commerce becomes the first suggestion.
To start with a random book, use the following link and reload the page until you find one that interests you and that has several suggestions…
https://library.hud.ac.uk/perl/relationships2.pl
…then try adding one of the suggested books to the selection (by clicking on it) to see what the revised suggestions are.

As promised to the HORIZON-L mailing list, here’s a Perl script we use to monitor our HIP server:
www.daveyp.com/files/stuff/monitor/monitor.pl
Once you’ve downloaded it, rename the file to monitor.pl
In summary, the script checks two URLs and sends an email to one (or more) email addresses if a trigger is reached:
(1) the first check is that your HIP home page is returning a 2xx HTTP status code
(2) the second check is that a HIP keyword search is returning results
Continue reading “Keeping an eye on your HIP”

I like sneaking in new OPAC bits when no-one’s looking and then waiting for people to discover them 🙂
Before Christmas, I was chatting to Kathryn Greenhill in Second Life about OPAC-y (or should it be “OPACeous?”) things, and I turned a vile of green when I discovered that she’s got user ratings on their OPAC at Murdoch University.
I should point out that’s “green” as in “envy” rather than as in “driving the porcelain bus“!  Having said that, I like to think there might be at least a couple of ultra-conservative librarians out there somewhere who do get nauseous whenever they see Web/Library 2.0 stuff creeping into that nasty online card catalogue… just like Maggie might do in “Little Britain”:

Anyway, half an hour of frenetic mod_perl and MySQL activity later and we’ve now got something similar on our OPAC:


I’d like to add the facility for user comments/reviews too, but for the moment I’m happy just take a few baby steps with user ratings.

Yesterday, during Brian Kelly‘s opening session on Web 2.0 at the CILIP “Fly in the Web: Power to the User” event at Leeds Met, I started to think about ways of our linking library stuff into del.icio.us…
One of the things I’ve already hacked into the OPAC is the ability for a user to see their lending history — you can see a bit of it at the foot of this screen shot:

So, I decided to play around with the del.icio.us import facility to see if it was possible to export the lending history from the OPAC and then import it.
The first thing I did was to get a version of the lending history in a suitable format (see Netscape Bookmark File Format).  You can see my bookmark file at this URL:
https://library.hud.ac.uk/history/5/5d/5da5fe138f7cf2…html
(I should point out that my library card gets used for a lot of testing, so I haven’t really borrowed everything on there… honest!)
If you look at the HTML source for the page, you’ll spot that I’ve included the tag “hudunilibrary” and (when available) the ISBN for each item.  Each item also has a description for the last checked date & time (I’m still not sure if I should include that info?).
Once you’ve got the bookmark file, you then need to save it to your hard drive and run the import process in del.icio.us:

The only real potential problem is that del.icio.us automatically marks all imported links as “private” — so, if you want to share your lending history, then you need to manually update every link (very tedious!).  Anyway, I’ve shared a few just so you can see the tag in action:
http://del.icio.us/tag/hudunilibrary
The import facility at LibraryThing is able to pick out the ISBNs in the bookmark file, so it’s also possible to transfer a subset of the lending history into there:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog_bottom.php?tag=hudunilibrary&view=daveyp
The Dynix/Horizon OPAC also has a “My List” facility, so I might see if it’s possible to hack that to output a suitable bookmark file as well.
I did mean to take a few photos at the CILIP event, but totally forget until Sheila Webber was halfway through her session on blogging — anywhere, you can find a couple of photos here.  I think someone may have taken a shot of me during my workshop session, although I’m not really the most photogenic of people!