If you’d told me a bit more than a year ago that I’d be getting all excited about the radical potential of library circulation data, well…
This afternoon we had an interesting chat with Dave Pattern from the University of Huddersfield (he of Opac 2.0 and ‘users who borrowed this also borrowed…’ fame). We’re hoping to collaborate with Dave to see how his important work can be taken forward on a national level. Dave is about to release the Huddersfield circulation data (anonymised and aggregated) to the community and he’s hoping it will trigger some debate and ideas for developments.  This certainly is a real opportunity for people in our field. On our end, we’d like to figure out how we could develop a similar feature for Copac, but also look at how to bring more libraries into the mix — contributing more data so those ‘recommendations’ are more effective.
Dave and I both sit on the TILE reference group, and there has been some important work going on in that project about the potential ‘goldmine’ of attention data we’re all sitting on at institutions and data centres. TILE recommendations suggest the development of an attention-data store service. Frankly, the sheer scale of this type of all encompassing undertaking gives me headpsin, but a service for the storage and open share of circulation data less so. In fact, JISC has also recently tasked Mimas and EDINA to propose work around ‘Personalised Search and Recommendation Engines,’ so there’s real scope to think carefully about what such a service might look like.
Goldmine indeed — I’m speaking (from my ‘sector perspective’) at the TILE meeting next week. The focus of the meeting is to look at how we can improve services for learners by aggregating and using learning behaviour data. For our part, I am keen to see where this work with circulation and attention data can take us, and I’m looking forward to putting some thoughts together on this score for the meeting.