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1 February 2007
You suggest me your's and I'll suggest you mine.....
Posted by Richard Wallis at February 1, 2007 06:22 PM
Dave Pattern of the University of Huddersfield quite rightly praises John Blyberg (and of course his team) for their latest functional addition to the AADL user interface - Dynamic item recommendations.
So today, at AADL, we quietly rolled out dynamic item recommendations. That means that when you're looking at a catalog record, you'll be given Amazon-like recommendations ("Users who checked out this item also checked out these library items..").
This is a feature Dave had popped in to Hudersfield's catalogue a few weeks back.
In his posting, Dave compares the results between the services and not unsurprisingly finds a difference between the recommendations of a British University Library and a Public Library in Michigan.
Apart from watching the latest game in the transatlantic feature-tennis match that John and Dave are playing, Dave's posting almost as an aside raises a good question:
I'd love to see more libraries offering suggestions. Imagine if you were able to easily compare your borrowing trends with other libraries — how much common ground would there be, and how much to local demographics come into play?
Wouldn't all users benefit from these recommendations being derived from data aggregated across many libraries - in a controlled manner perhaps so that the loaning patterns of similar libraries be included.
If you hover over the URLs in Dave's posting you will see that the calling syntaxes are very different, also you obviously end up in very different user interfaces when you follow them. What if this functionality was available via an API, or the data [anonymized of course] was available for harvesting for aggregation in to a service that its self could have an API that could be used by many systems.
Just a thought!
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Comments
"What if this functionality was available via an API..."
Hey, that's what Pewbot's for Richard!
www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/69/
Seriously tho, if anyone wants to come up with a standard for sharing book suggestions then I'm all for it.
Posted by: Dave Pattern at February 1, 2007 07:05 PM
