For anyone listening out there in library land who hasn’t picked up on Dave Pattern’s blog post from earlier today – WHY NOT? Go and read it, NOW: Free book usage data from the University of Huddersfield:
I’m very proud to announce that Library Services at the University of Huddersfield has just done something that would have perhaps been unthinkable a few years ago: we’ve just released a major portion of our book circulation and recommendation data under an Open Data Commons/CC0 licence. In total, there’s data for over 80,000 titles derived from a pool of just under 3 million circulation transactions spanning a 13 year period.
http://library.hud.ac.uk/usagedata/
I would like to lay down a challenge to every other library in the world to consider doing the same.
So are you going to pick up the challenge…?
And if not, WHY NOT? (Dave posts some answers to the first two or three objections you’ll try to raise, such as the privacy question and the licensing question.)
He also sketches out some elements of a possible future:
I want you to imagine a world where a first year undergraduate psychology student can run a search on your OPAC and have the results ranked by the most popular titles as borrowed by their peers on similar courses around the globe.
I want you to imagine a book recommendation service that makes Amazon’s look amateurish.
I want you to imagine a collection development tool that can tap into the latest borrowing trends at a regional, national and international level.
DON’T YOU DARE NOT DO THIS…
See also a presentation Dave gave to announce this release – Can You Dig It? A systems Perspective:
What else… Library website analytics – are you making use of them yet? I know the OU Library is collecting analytics on the OU Library website, although I don’t think they’re using them? (Knowing that you had x thousand page views last week is NOT INTERESTING. Most of them were probably people flailing round the site failing to find what they wanted? (And before anyone from the Library says that’s not true, PROVE IT TO ME – or at least to yourself – with some appropriate analytics reports.) For example, I haven’t noticed any evidence of changes to the website or A/B testing going on as a result of using Googalytics on the site??? (Hmmm – that’s probably me in trouble again…!;-)
PS I’ve just realised I didn’t post a link to Course Analytics presentation from Online Info last week, so here it is:
Nor did I mention the follow up podcast chat I had about the topic with Richard Wallis from Talis: Google Analytics to analyse student course activity – Tony Hirst Talks with Talis.
Or the “commendation” I got at the IWR Information Professional Award ceremony. I like to think this was for being the “unprofessional” of the year (in the sense of “unconference”, of course…;-). It was much appreciated, anyway :-)
OUseful.Info, the blog... 