Library & Service PerspectiveThe University of Huddersfield Experience

Dave Pattern

Library Systems Manager

University of Huddersfield, UK

d.c.pattern@hud.ac.uk

preamble

• These slides are available at…– http://slideshare.net/daveyp

• Please remix and reuse these slides!– creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0

• Have you remembered to switch your phone on?– please feel free take photos, record audio, live blog,

tweet (@daveyp, #jiscmosaic), etc

University of Huddersfield Library

• Medium sized UK University– 20,000 students and 2,000 staff– Library holds over 240,000 books

• Current LMS/ILS Horizon installed in 1996– over 3 million borrowing (“circ”)

transactions stored in the DB

library cataloguelibrary catalogue

• General unhappiness with vendor product• “In-house” enhancements to the existing

OPAC…– user suggestions from surveys– “Web 2.0” inspired features– borrowing good ideas from other web sites – new features launched with no/low publicity– “perpetual beta”

backgroundsummer 2005

suggestions based on circ data“people who borrowed this…”

suggestions based on circ data“people who borrowed this…”

borrowing profileaverage loans per month

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

35000

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

average number of book loans per month

0

1000

2000

3000

4000

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

average number of clicks per month on “people who borrowed this” suggestions

feature usage“people who borrowed this…”

getting personal!suggestions for what to borrow next

building better new book listscourse specific RSS feeds

building better new book listscourse specific RSS feeds

the impactthe impact

40000

50000

60000

70000

80000

90000

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

number of unique titles (bib#) borrowed per calendar year (2009 figure is predicted)

the impact on borrowingrange of stock borrowed per year

borrowing suggestions added to catalogue at start of 2006

average number of books borrowed per active borrower per calendar year (2009 predicted)

the impact on borrowingaverage number of books borrowed

13

14

15

16

17

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

keyword cloud

catalogue keyword searchesguided searches

catalogue keyword searchesguided searches

catalogue keyword searchesguided searches

catalogue keyword searchesguided searches

usage data for staff

usage data for staffloans per academic school

usage data for staffloans per academic school

usage data for staffborrowing profile

open dataopen data

• http://library.hud.ac.uk/usagedata/– prompted by the JISC Tile Project– aggregated usage data for 2 million circulation

transactions, covering around 80,000 book titles– recommendation data for over 37,000 titles– simple XML format– Open Data Commons / CC0 licence

library usage data release“if you love something, set it free…”

• Data released on 12th Dec 2008…

• …2 days later, Patrick Murray-John at University of Mary Washington converted the data into a semantic version (RDF)– Patrick’s blog post at http://bit.ly/noJD– Talis podcast at http://bit.ly/z6yjF

library usage data release“if you love something, set it free…”

library usage dataBA (Hons) Multimedia Design

non-usagenon-usage

Non/Low-usage Project2005 onwards

Non/Low-usage Project2005 onwards

summarysummary

final thoughts…

• Serendipity is helping change borrowing habits

• Analysis of usage data allows greater insights in how our services are used (or not used!)

• What benefits can be derived if we were all sharing our data?