I’m finally back home, 15 hours after setting off at an unmentionable hour to travel down to the CILIP event in London today. I’m a creature of habit, and my habit is to wake up gradually at about 6:45am in the morning — getting up at 5am just doesn’t feel right 😀
I’m too knackered to write very much, but a big thank you to everyone involved for giving me the chance to show off some of our OPAC tweaks, and thanks to everyone who chatted to me or took one of my moo cards!
It was also great to finally meet Tim Hodson (Information Takes Over) in the flesh. Isn’t it weird meeting someone you’ve never seen before but whose blog you read on a regular basis? It might just be me, but UK library bloggers rarely seem to include a photograph of themselves. If I was to include a picture of myself, I’d choose this picture (which isn’t of me, but I like to pretend it might be because his name is “Davey” too)…
I thoroughly enjoyed all of the speakers today, but (am I allowed to pick a favourite?) I really really enjoyed Antony Brewerton‘s session — I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed so much during a presentation!
I’ve uploaded the final version of my presentation to https://library.hud.ac.uk/cilip/ and there’s also a few photographs on Flickr (unfortunately I left my rucksack at the front of the room after my session, so I couldn’t take any photographs in the afternoon). If you’ve ever wanted to see what a sunrise over Huddersfield gasworks looks like, then you won’t be disappointed!!!
Category: Library Stuff
Horizon — the five stages of grief
Well, I finally passed through the “denial” stage yesterday evening (which was partly why I didn’t post the information I knew until the formal announcement), slipped in “anger” overnight (good job I can never remember my nightmares!), which I guess puts me firmly into the “bargaining” stage today…
I wonder if I rang up SirsiDynix and promised to be a nicer person or told them how much I love them, they might reconsider?
Unfortunately, this means I’ll either be in the “depression” or “acceptance” stage during my presentation at the CILIP: “Re-imagining the Library” Executive Briefing tomorrow.
I guess either is better than still being in the “anger” stage — 15 minutes of me on the stage shaking my fists at the heavens screaming “Why God? Why?!? Horizon 8.0 looked so beautiful with its funky Aqua style buttons! Take me instead!!! Wait a minute… Statue of Liberty? …that was our planet! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!” might well go down as a memorable presentation, but not in a “good” way.
Anyway, if nothing else, the upcoming European Conference in May is going to be extremely interesting — if you haven’t done so already, get your space booked now!
RIP: Horizon
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.
Rumo(u)rs
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…
If you build it, will they come? (part 2)
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!
wine + coding + book covers = something
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.
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night…
As reported at the Gordian Knot, Pat Sommers (CEO, SirsiDynix) has resigned.
I don’t think we were expecting Pat to come to the joint EUUG & Dynix User Group Conference in Barcelona, but it will be interesting to see if anyone from Vista attends.
The conference programme is shaping up nicely, so I’m looking forward to seeing new sights and old friends, as well as making new friends. Just in case anyone is undecided about attending, here’s what the view should be like from your hotel bedroom window…
(Cathedral of Santa Eulàlia)
p.s. if you are planning to attend, please let me know if you’d like adding to the Google Map for the event!
Keeping an eye on your HIP
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”
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?
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!
“Spooky” and “Eureka!” moments
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
Continue reading ““Spooky” and “Eureka!” moments”