Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Loan data

Loan data

January 20, 2006 • Categories: Libraries - organization and services

I notice that the test catalogue at the University of Huddersfield is showing loan history.

Quite nice. Does it tell you everything about the book? No. Is it interesting? Yes. Does it enhance the user experience? Well, it did mine. I even played with it for a while looking to see what sort of profile books I was familiar with had. Another way of considering the book, presented in an easy to understand way ....

Update: The catalog tends to be flat. It does not offer much of an experience. I like this feature because it adds another dimension to your understanding of the book. As does the 'people who have borrowed this have also borrowed ..' feature. These added features potentially increase the engagement of the user.

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2 comments so far

Posted by Dave Pattern on January 23, 2006

It's primarily to aid stock editing, although I'm warming to the idea of letting users see it in the live OPAC. I'm also keen to see if the same data can be represented with a simple Sparkline.

Just in case you're wondering, the lighter thin bar is the number of unique borrowers (handy to see if it was the same person checking the item out repeatedly, or a group of different borrowers).

Inspired by John Blyberg's work, I'm just polishing off a REST style interface to our catalog (webcat.hud.ac.uk/rest/info.html). Loan history data (at both the bib and item) level is included in that too.

Posted by Charly Bauer on January 27, 2006

I like it.

When Nicholson Baker wrote "Discards" he lamented the loss of the card catalog for a variety of reasons, one of which was the loss of data that is available on the card - wear and tear, scribbled comments, and other indications that other users had been there interacting with the card, and perhaps the item itself.

12 Years after Discards was written we're putting some of that data back to users!

Discards is reprinted in
The Size of Thoughts