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I received an interesting brief this week at work: look into mapping our active members in order to get a better idea where in the city we need to promote more. Like anyone these days handed a mapping project, my first thought was “Google Maps!”. However my previous experience working on the landmarks map made me [...] I whipped up this proof of concept this week to address a problem with our booklists (and in fact with any lists of books which appear on our website including reviews and new materials lists as well). Booklists are great but what good is a title if it’s not available? Unfortunately, the booklists are on our [...] I keep coming back to our circ stats based book recommendations because it is an evolving system. Each month, I load new circ data into it which changes the recommendations. After I load the data, I always spend a few minutes poking around to see if anything interesting has happened. I have a few favourite author [...] That is, doing innovative stuff that makes other folks jealous! This time, it’s testing a growl/prowl based messaging system to summon iphone-equipped roving librarians back to the desk: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jblyberg/4050890230/ I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that we use syndetics to provide cover images in our catalogue. One area of weakness has always been lack of covers for movies and music cds. Most of these lack isbns which makes cover access a problem. To compound this, the iii opac will not allow you to use upc codes [...] This post by Dave Pattern mention stats for how heavily their recommendations based on past circs are used: To date, we’ve had over 90,000 clicks on the “people who borrowed this, also borrowed” suggestions, with a peak of 5,229 clicks in a single month (~175 clicks per day). Apart from the “Did you mean?” spelling suggestions, [...] Great name for a library blog and this long post by Ross Singer is also absolutely great…in particular, we found his comments about webfeat to be spot on: It is also, by the gentlest assessment possible, a complete train wreck of a user experience. Besides being slower than the stock catalog interface, it does a terrible [...] This past week, downloadable video was added to the Overdrive site we share with other local libraries. I remember looking at such an offering from another Ontario library a couple years ago and thinking how awful it was. It seemed to be all laughably outdated industrial and educational fare. The good news is that now there [...] I was poking around on our web server looking for things we need to make sure not to leave behind when we move to our new site/server. In particular, I was worried about forgotten back-office apps that would need to be ported from ColdFusion to PHP. Happily, I only found two and I was already [...] We upgraded to Release 2007 of our ILS software this week. In terms of the customization I’ve done to the opac, it was a worst case scenario. Pretty much everything broke. I managed to fix pretty much everything though within a day or two. The lone hold-out was the patron rss feeds. It seems something about [...] |
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