Announcing the Copac Activity Data Project (otherwise known as SALT 2)

Posted on February 2, 2012 by joypalmer

We’re extremely pleased to announce that thanks to funding from JISC, we are about to commence work that builds on the success of SALT, and provides further understanding of the potential of aggregating and sharing library circulation data to support recommender functionality and the local and national levels. From now until July 31st 2012, we want to strengthen the existing business case for openly sharing circulation data to support recommendations, and will produce a scoping and feasibility report for a shared national service to support circulation data aggregation, normalisation, and distribution for reuse via an open API.

To achieve this we plan to aggregate and normalise data from libraries in addition to JRUL and to make this available along with the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester dataset through a shared API; our new partner in this include: Cambridge University library, Lincoln University Library, Sussex University Library, and University of Huddersfield Library.

CopacAD will conduct primary research to investigate the following additional use cases:

an undergraduate from a teaching and learning institution searching for course related materials
academics/teachers using the recommender to support the development of course reading lists
librarians using the recommendations to support academics/lecturers and collections development.

At the same time, we’re going to develop a Shared Service Scoping and Feasibility study will explore the options for a shared service for aggregating, normalising and hosting circulation data, and the potential range of web services/APIs that could be made available on top of that data.

Issues we’ll address will include identifying what infrastructure would need to be in place, how scaleable the service would need to be, and whether the service can scale with demand, the potential use cases for such a service, and benefits to be realised, the projected costs of such a service on an ongoing basis, technical and financial sustainability, including potential business model options moving forward.

If you’re interested in learning more, here’s the proposal for this work [doc]. And as with SALT, we will be regularly updating the community on our progress and lessons learned through this blog.

User Feedback Results – Super 8

Posted on September 1, 2011 by janinerigby

In an effort to find the magic number the SALT team opened its testing labs again this week. Another 6 University of Manchester post graduate students spent the afternoon interrogating the Copac and John Rylands library catalogues to evaluate the recommendations thrown back by the SALT API.

With searches ranging from ’The Archaeology of Islam in Sub Saharan Africa’ to ‘Volunteering and Society: Principles and Practice’ no aspect of the Arts and Humanities was left unturned, or at least it felt that way. We tried to find students with diverse interests within Arts and Humanities to test the recommendations from as many angles as possible. Using the same format as the previous groups (documented in our earlier blog post ‘What do users think of the SALT recommender?’), the library users were asked to complete an evaluation of the recommendations they were given. Previously the users tested SALT when the threshold was set at 3(that is 3 people borrowed the book which therefore made it eligible to be thrown back as a recommendation), however we felt that the results could be improved. Previously, although 77.5% found at least one recommendation useful, too many recommendations were rated as ’not that useful’,(see the charts in ‘What do users think of the SALT recommender?’).

This time, we set the threshold at 15 in the John Rylands library catalogue and 8 in Copac. Like the LIDP team at Huddersfield, (http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/2011/08/30/focus-group-analysis/), we have a lot of data to work with now, and we’d like to spend some more time interrogating the results to find out whether clear patterns emerge. Although, our initial analysis has also raised some further questions, it’s also revealed some interesting and encouraging results. Here are the highlights of what we found out.

The Results

On initial inspection the JRUL with its threshold of 15 improved on previous results;

Do any of the recommendations look useful:

92.3 % of the searches returned at least one item the user thought was useful, however when the user was asked if they would borrow at least one item only 56.2% answered that they would.

When asked, a lot of the users stated that they knew the book and so wouldn’t need to borrow it again, or that although the book was useful, their area of research was so niche that it wasn’t specifically useful to them but they would deem it as ‘useful’ to others in their field.

One of the key factors which came up in the discussions with users was the year that the book had been published. The majority of researchers are in need of up to date material, many preferring the use of journals rather than monographs, and this was taken into account when deciding whether a book is worth borrowing. Many users wouldn’t borrow anything more than 10 years old;

‘Three of the recommendations are ‘out of date’ 1957, 1961, 1964 as such I would immediately discount them from my search’ 30/08/11 University of Manchester, Postgraduate, Arts and Humanities, SALT testing group.

So the book could be a key text, and ‘useful’ but it wouldn’t necessarily be borrowed. Quite often, one user explained, rather than reading a key text she would search for journal articles about the key text, to get up to date discussion and analysis about it. This has an impact on our hypothesis which is to discover the long tail. Quite often the long tail that is discovered includes older texts, which some users discount.

Copac, with a threshold of 8 was also tested. Results here were encouraging;

Do any of the recommendations look useful;

Admittedly further tests would need to be done on both thresholds as the number of searches conducted (25) do not give enough results to draw concrete conclusions from but it does seem as if the results are vastly improved on increase of the threshold.

No concerns about privacy

The issue of privacy was raised again. Many of the postgraduate students are studying niche areas and seemed to understand how this could affect them should the recommendations be attributed back to them. However, as much as they were concerned about their research being followed, they were also keen to use the tool themselves and so their concerns were outweighed by the perceived benefits. As a group they agreed that a borrowing rate of 5 would offer them enough protection whilst still returning interesting results. The group had no concerns about the way in which the data was being used and indeed trusted the libraries to collect this data and use it in such a productive way.

‘It’s not as if it is being used for commercial gain, then what is the issue?’ 30/08/11 University of Manchester, Postgraduate, Arts and Humanities, SALT testing group.

Unanimous support for the recommender

The most encouraging outcome from the group was the uniform support for the book recommender. Every person in the group agreed that the principle of the book recommender was a good one, and they gave their resolute approval that their data was collected and used in a positive way.

All of them would use the book recommender if it was available. Indeed one researcher asked, ‘can we have it now?’

Janine Rigby and Lisa Charnock 31/08/11

Final blog post

Posted on August 1, 2011 by joypalmer

In this final post I’m going to sum up what this project has produced, potential next steps, key lessons learned, and what we’d pass on to others working in this area.

In the last five months, the SALT project has produced a number of outputs:

Data extraction recipe: http://salt11.wordpress.com/recipe-data-extraction-from-talis/
Details on how the algorithm can support recommendations (courtesy Dave Pattern): http://www.daveyp.com/blog/archives/1453
Technical processes documentation for processing the data and supporting the recommender API (though the API itself is not yet published): http://salt11.wordpress.com/technical-processes/
An open licensing statement from JRUL which means the data can be made available for reuse (we’ve yet to determine how to make this happen, given the size of the dataset; and we also need to explore whether CC-BY is the most appropriate license going forward): http://salt11.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/agreeing-licensing-of-data/
A trial recommender functionality in the live Copac prototype: http://salt11.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/copac_recommender.jpg
A recommender function the JRUL library search interface prototype: http://salt11.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/salt_jrul.jpg
User testing instruments:SALT Postgraduate User Discussion Guide SALT user response sheet and results
F eedback from collections managers & potential data contributors helping us consider weaknesses and opportunities, as well as possible sustainable next steps.

Next steps:

There are a number of steps that can be taken as a result of this project – some imminent ‘quick wins’ which we plan to take on after the official end, and then others that are ‘bigger’ than this project.

What we plan to do next anyway:

Adjust the threshold to a higher level (using the ‘usefulness’ benchmark given to us as users as a basis) so as to suppress some of the more off-base recommendations our users were bemused by.
Implement the recommender in the JRUL library search interface
Once the threshold has been reset, consider implementing the recommender as an option feature in the new Copac interface. We’d really like to, but we’d need to assess if the results are too JRUL-centric.
Work with JRUL to determine most appropriate mechanisms for hosting the data and supporting the API in the longer term (decisions here are dependent on how, if at all, we continue with this work from a Shared Services perspective)
Work with JRUL to assess the impact of this in the longer term (on user satisfaction, and on borrowing behaviour)

The Big Picture (what else we’d like to see happen):

1. Aggregate more data. Combine the normalised data from JRUL with processed data from additional libraries that represent a wider range of institutions, including learning and teaching. Our hunch is that only a few more would make the critical difference in ironing out some of the skewed results we get from focusing on one data set (i.e. results skewed to JRUL course listings)

2. Assess longer term impact. Longer-term analysis of the impact of the recommender functionality on JRUL user satisfaction and borrowing behaviour. Is there, as with Huddersfield, more borrowing from ‘across the shelf’? Is our original hypothesis borne out?

3. Requirements and costs gathering for a shared service. Establish the requirements and potential costs for a shared service to support processing, aggregation, and sharing of activity data via an API. Based on this project, we have a fair idea of what those requirements might be, but our experience with JRUL indicates that such provision need to adequately support the handling and processing of large quantities of data. How much FTE, processing power, and storage would we need if we scaled to handling more libraries? Part of this requirements gathering exercise would involve identifying additional contributing libraries, and the size of their data.

4. Experiment with different UI designs and algorithm thresholds to support different use cases. For example, undergraduate users vs ‘advanced’ researcher users might benefit from the thresholds being set differently; in addition, there are users who want to see items held elsewhere and how to get them vs those who don’t. Some libraries will be keen to manage user expectations if they are ‘finding’ stock that’s not held at the home institution.

5. Establish more recipes to simplify data extraction from the more common LMS’s beyond Talis (Horizon, ExLibris Voyager, and Innovative).

6. Investigate how local activity data can help collections managers identify collection strengths and recognise items that should be retained because of association with valued collections. We thought about this as a form of “stock management by association.” Librarians might treat some long-tail items (e.g. items with limited borrowing) with caution if they were aware of links/associations to other collections (although there is also the caveat that this wouldn’t be possible with local activity data reports in isolation)

7. More ambitiously, investigate how nationally aggregated activity data could support activities such as stock weeding by revealing collection strengths or gaps and allowing librarians to cross check against other collections nationally. This could also inform the number of copies a library should buy, and which books from reading lists are required in multiple copies.

8. Learning and teaching support. Explore the relationship between recommended lists and reading lists, and how it can be used as a tool to support academic teaching staff.

9. Communicate the benefits to decision-makers. If work were to continue along these lines, then a recommendation that has come out strongly from our collaborators is the need to accompany any development activity with a targeted communications plan, which continually articulates the benefits of utilising activity data to support search to decision-makers within libraries. While within our community a significant amount of momentum is building in this area, our meetings with librarians indicates that the ‘why should I care?’ and more to the point ‘why should I make this a priority?’ questions are not adequately answered. In a nutshell, ‘leveraging activity data’ can easily fall down or off the priority lists of most library managers. It would be particularly useful to tie these benefits to the strategic aims and objectives of University libraries as a means to get such work embedded in annual operational planning.

What can other institutions do to benefit from our work?

For those using the Talis LMS (and with a few years of data stored), institutions can extract data, and create their own API to pull in as a recommender function using these recipes.
Institutions can benefit from the work we did with users to understand their perceptions of the function, and can be assured that students (undergraduates and postgraduates) can see the immediate benefit (as long as we get rid of some of the odd stuff by setting the threshold higher)
Use the findings of this project to support a business case for this work to their colleagues

How can they go about this?

Assess the quality and quantity of the data stored in your LMS to determine if there’s potential there. For this project (and for the simple recommender based on ‘people who borrowed) you only need data that ties unique individuals to borrowed items (see more from Andy Land on the data extraction process and how anonymisation is handled here: http://salt11.wordpress.com/recipe-data-extraction-from-talis/).

To understand how the recommender algorithm works, see this post Dave Pattern wrote for us: http://www.daveyp.com/blog/archives/1453

To follow our steps in terms of data format, loading, processing, and setting up an API see Dave Chaplin’s explanation: http://salt11.wordpress.com/technical-processes/

To conduct user-testing and focus groups to assess the recommender, feel free to draw from our SALT Postgraduate User Discussion Guide and SALT user response sheet.

Our most significant lessons:

A lower threshold may throw up ‘long tail’ items, but they are likely to not be deemed relevant or useful by users (although they might be seen as ‘interesting’ and something they might look into further). Set a threshold of ten or so, as the University of Hudderfield has, and the quality of recommendations is relatively sound.
Concerns over anonymisation and data privacy are not remotely shared by the users we spoke to. While we might question this response as potentially naive, this does indicate that users trust libraries to handle their data in a way that protects them and also benefits them.
You don’t necessarily need a significant backlog of data to make this work locally. Yes, we had ten years worth from JRUL, which turned out to be a vast amount of data to crunch. But interestingly in our testing phases when we worked with only 5 weeks of data, the recommendations were remarkably good. Of course, whether this is true elsewhere, depends on the nature and size of the institution. But it’s certainly worth investigating.
If the API is to work on the shared service level, then we need more (but potentially not many more) representative libraries to aggregate data from in order to ensure that recommendations aren’t skewed to represent one institution’s holdings, course listings or niche research interests, and can support different use cases (i.e. learning and teaching).

Lessons learned from the user evaluation perspective (or can we define the ‘long tail’?)

Posted on August 1, 2011 by joypalmer

The key lesson we’ve learned during this project is that the assumptions behind the hypothesis of this project need to be reconsidered, as in this context the ‘long tail’ is complex and difficult to measure. Firstly how do we evaluate what is ‘long tail’ from a user perspective? We may draw a line in the sand in terms of number of times an item has been borrowed, but this doesn’t necessarily translate into individual or community contexts. Most of this project was taken up with processing the data and creating the API and UI; if we’d had a bit more time we could have spent more resource dealing with these questions as they arose during testing.

The focus groups highlight how diverse and unique each researcher and what they are researching is. We chose humanities postgrads, PhD’s and masters level, but in this group alone we have a huge range of topic areas, from the incredibly niche to the rather more popular. Therefore we had some respondents who found the niche searches fruitful and others who found nothing, because their research area is so niche, hardly any material they don’t already know about doesn’t exist. In addition, when long tail is revealed, some researchers find it outdated or irrelevant. This is why it isn’t borrowed that often. So is there any merit in bringing it to the attention of the research community?

Further more in-depth testing in this area needs to be done in order to find answers to some of these problems. The testing for this project asked the respondents to rate their searches and pick out some of the more interesting texts. But we need to sit with fewer researchers and broaden the discussions. What is relevant? How do you guage it as relevant? Some of the respondents said the books were not relevant but more said they would borrow them, so where does this discrepancy come from? Perhaps ‘relevant’ is not the correct term, can the long tail of discovery produce new perspectives, interesting associations perhaps previously not thought of? Only one-to-one in-depth testing can give the right data which will then indicate which level the threshold should be set.

After all is there any point in having a recommender which only gives you recommendations you expect or know about already? However, some participants wanted this from a recommender or expected it and were disappointed when they got results they could not predict. I know if I search for a CD on Amazon that I’m familiar with I sometimes get recommendations I know about or already own. So the recommender means different things to different people. There is a group that are satisfied they know all the recommended texts and can sleep soundly knowing they have completely saturated their research topic and there is a group that need new material.

The long tail hypothesis is a difficult one to prove in a short term project of 6 months. As its name suggests the long tail needs to be explored over a long time. Monitoring borrowing patterns in the library, click through and feedback from the user community and librarians will help to refine the recommender tool for ultimate effectiveness.

What do the users think of the SALT recommender?

Posted on July 29, 2011 by janinerigby

Following internal in house testing the recommender was open to the users. In the last week of July 18 humanities postgraduates passed through the SALT testing labs, (11 PhD students, 3 taught Masters students and 4 research students). Lisa and I held three focus groups and grilled our potential users about the SALT recommender. The research methods used were designed to answer our objectives, with an informal discussion to begin with to find out how postgraduate students approach library research and to gauge the potential support for the book recommender. Following the discussion we began testing the actual recommender to answer our other research objectives which were:

Does SALT give you recommendations which are logical and useful?
Does it make you borrow more library books?
Does it suggest to you books and materials you may not have known about but are useful and interesting?

As a team we agreed to set the threshold of the SALT recommender deliberately low, with a view to increasing this and testing again if results were not good. As our hypothesis is based on discovering the hidden long tail of library research we wanted the recommender to return results that were unexpected – research gems that were treasured and worthy items but had somehow been lost and only borrowed a few times.

42 searches in total were done on the SALT recommender and of those 42, 77.5% returned at least one recommendation, (usually many more) that participants said would be useful. (As an aside, one of the focus groups participants found something so relevant she immediately went to borrow it after the group has finished!)

However the deliberately low threshold may have caused some illogical returns. The groups were asked to comment on the relevance of the first 5 recommendations, but quite often it was the books further down the list that were of more relevance and interest. One respondent referred to it as a ‘Curate’s egg’ however, assured me this was in reference to some good and some bad. His first five were of little relevance, ‘only tangentially linked’, his 6^th, 7^th, 8^th, 9^th, 11^thand even 17^th recommendations were all ‘very relevant’. Unfortunately this gave disappointing results when the first 5 suggested texts were rated for relevance, as demonstrated in the pie chart below.

However the likelihood of borrowing these items gave slightly more encouraging results;

Clearly we’ve been keen on the threshold count. Lessons need to be learnt about the threshold number and this perhaps is a reflection of our initial hypothesis. We think that there would be much merit in increasing the threshold number and retesting.

On a positive note, initial discussions with the researchers (and just a reminder these are seasoned researchers, experts in their chosen fields familiar and long term users of the John Ryland’s University Research Library) told us that the recommender would be a welcome addition to Copac and the library catalogue. 99% of the researchers in the groups had used and were familiar with Amazons recommender function and 100% would welcome a similar function on the catalogues based on circulation records.

Another very pertinent point, and I cannot stress this strongly enough, was the reactions expressed in regards to privacy and collection and subsequent use of this data. The groups were slightly bemused by questions regarding privacy. No one expressed any concern about the collection of activity data and its use in the recommender. In fact most assumed this data was collected anyway and encouraged us to use it in this way, as ultimately it is being used to develop a tool which helps them to research more effectively and efficiently.

Overwhelmingly, the groups found the recommender useful. They were keen that their comments be fed back to developers and that work should continue on the recommender to get the results right as they were keen to use it and hoped it would be available soon.

Refining SALT (techie lessons learned)

Posted on July 29, 2011 by dchaplin70

While early tests with a sample set of data from JRUL were encouraging, see See SALT – a demo, an overhaul of the methodology behind the recommender API was required once the full set of loan transactions was obtained.

It was feared that processing the data into the nborrowers table – containing, for each combination of two items, a count of the unique number of library users to have borrowed both items – might become too onerous with the anticipated 3 million records. That fear turned to blind panic when 8 million loan records actually arrived!

The approach for processing the data for the API was thus re-jigged. As before the data was loaded into two MySQL tables, items and loans, and then some simple processing pushed the total number of loans for each item into a further, nloans, table. The remainder of the logic for the recommender was moved to run, on demand, in the API.

Given the ISBN of a certain item, let’s say ITEM A, and a threshold value, the PHP script for the API was coded to do the following:

Find the list of all users in the loans table who have borrowed ITEM A
For each user found in 1. find the list of all items in the loans table that have been borrowed by that user
Sum across the lists of items found in 2. to compile a single list of all possible suggested items which includes, for each of these items, the number of unique users to have borrowed both that item and ITEM A
From the list in 3. remove ITEM A and any items for which the number of unique users falls below the given threshold
For each item in the list derived in 4. divide the number of unique users of that item by the total number of times that item has been borrowed, from the nloans table
Rank the items in the list in 5. by the ratio of unique users to total loans
Find the details of each item in the list in 6. from the items table and return the list of suggestions

Testing showed that certain queries of the MySQL database involved in the above process were time consuming and affected the responsiveness of the API. The following extra pre-processing was thus performed:

The items table was split into 10 smaller tables
The loans table was split into 5 smaller tables

With queries rewritten so that searches access each of these smaller tables in turn rather than just looking at the original, large tables there was a significant boost in API performance. The number of divisions for the above splits was somewhat arbitrary but was sufficient to render the API usable for testing.

Further analysis would more than likely bring additional performance benefits, especially relevant as the amount of data is only going to grow (*). Also on the to-do list is expanding the range of output formats for the API; at present only xml and json are offered though both of the developers implementing the API in Copac and in JRUL respectively suggested that jsonp would be easier to work with.

(*) For reference, just over 8 million loan transactions are used for the current SALT recommender covering all available records up to July 2011, and these loans feature around 628,000 individual library items.

A sampling of SALT. How the recommender is working and initial feedback from postgrads

Posted on July 27, 2011 by joypalmer

We’re gearing up to meet with some of our collaborators tomorrow from the M25 consortium and Cambridge University Library; they’re helping us explore whether the model we’re developing for SALT (i.e. a centralised aggregation service & a shared API) is something we should pursue further). In preparation for that I am working furiously to gather all the learning that has happened (and is happening) so far. As I write, Lisa and Janine are running user testing and focus groups with postgraduate humanities student from the University of Manchester using the live prototype we have up from Copac. We’ve asked this group to run their own searches and assess the results. Below you can see a sampling of what they’ve been looking for, and what recommendations they’re getting.

The overall reaction is very positive, although in general people find the recommendations further down the rankings to be more relevant. Up top, some of the recommendations are at times off-base. My own favourite book to search, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, is no exception — some apparently random items at the top of the list when you look at that one. (I do wonder if this represents a particular reading list for a theatre studies course at JRUL, and this is why it’s happening. Worth exploring). Overall, though, we think this is because we’ve set the threshold (only 3 borrowers in common) deliberately low to test out our long tail hypothesis (Dave Pattern kindly explains here how the algorithm works). What we’re also hearing is that students are finding items they’ve not discovered before now which they deem relevant and likely to borrow. A few have commented that the recommendations get them thinking a bit more laterally — that the concepts they are exploring are picked up in different disciplinary contexts. I find this part particularly interesting when considering in light of the search and research behaviour of humanities researchers. A fuller report on the user testing will be published shortly.

It will be interesting to see if some of the lower ranked recommendations might still be considered ‘long tail’ (and we need to consider how we’re defining ‘long tail’ in this context, of course). This will be an interesting topic for discussion for tomorrow, and we’d definitely welcome the views of any readers on this score (as well as the question of relevancy).

Another interesting note: I ran a search for items in the University of Huddersfield OPAC to compare the recommendations. Interestingly, none of the items (admittedly miniscule sample here!) are in the Huddersfield OPAC. Obviously we’re dealing with two very different libraries and use cases here, but it drives home to me how differentiated the benefits will be at the local level, and raises questions over the utility of sharing activity data for use at the local level. That said, I think what we have with the JRUL data (10 years worth) is something that could likely be of real value to a lot of libraries. How much of a ‘critical mass’ do we need for this to be critical? Do libraries need to have a similar core user base and mission to JRUL to derive benefit from this set, I wonder?

Anyway, enough musing. Here are the recommendations. (btw: For now the below links go to the Copac protoytpe, but this is only going to be public for a while –we’re planning to launch formally in the autumn, but we’ve got work to do yet!)

Translation and censorship patterns of communication and interference

Published: Dublin ; Portland, OR : Four Courts Press, c2009.

Physical description: 256 p. ; 24 cm.

ISBN

Notes:

Papers from a conference on translation and censorship held in Trinity College Dublin in October 2005.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 221-236) and index.

Contents:

Introduction — Part 1, Theory : Censorship and self-censorship in translation : ethics and ideology, resistance and collusion / Maria Tymoczko — Censorship as a collaborative project : a systematic approach / Piotr Kuhiwczak — Translators, the tacit censors / Elisabeth Gibbels — Part 2, Classical and renaissance : Censoring these ‘racy morsels of the vernacular’ : loss and gain in the translation of Apuleius and Catullus / Carol O’Sullivan — The Petrarch they tried to ban / Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin & Deirdre Serjeantson — Part 3, Censoring regimes : Translating under pressure : censorship of foreign literature in Italy between the wars / Jane Dunnett — Pasternak’s Hamlet : translation, censorship and indirect communication / Aoife Gallagher — Censorship in Francoist Spain and the importation of translations from South America : the case of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine / Cristina Gómez Castro — Part 4, Sensitivities : The case of Don Quixote : one hundred years of Portuguese translations / Filipe Alves Machado — Translation as hagiographical weapon : the French perception of Katherine Mansfield / Gerri Kimber — More than a childhood revisited? : ideological dimensions in the American and British translations of Astrid Lindgren’s Madicken / Angelika Nikolowski-Bogomoloff — … comme des nègres : : whitewashed in translation / Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin — ‘Razom nas begato, nas ne podolati’ : remixes of the orange revolution anthem / Sarah Smyth.

Subject:

Other names

Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, 1942-
Ó Cuilleanáin, Cormac.
Parris, David L.

SALT Recommendations

	Sturge, Kate. – “The alien within” : translation into German during the Nazi Regime; Kate St 2004
	Constructing a sociology of translation / edited by Michaela Wolf, Alexandra 2007
	Audiovisual translation : language transfer on screen / edited by Jorge Diáz 2009
	Torresi, Ira. – Translating promotional and advertising texts / Ira Torresi 2010
	Brodzki, Bella. – Can these bones live? : translation, survival, and cultural memory / Bella B 2007
	The didactics of audiovisual translation / edited by Jorge Diáz Cintas 2008
	Claims, changes and challenges in translation studies : selected contributio 2004
	Translation in undergraduate degree programmes / edited by Kirsten Malmkjær 2004
	Modes of censorship and translation : national contexts and diverse media / 2007
	Pym, Anthony, 1956-. – Epistemological problems in translation and its teaching : a seminar for thi 1993
	Rimbaud’s rainbow : literary translation in higher education / edited by Pet 1998
	Zatlin, Phyllis, 1938-. – Theatrical translation and film adaptation : a practitioner’s view / Phyllis 2005
	Moving target : theatre translation and cultural relocation / edited by Caro 2000
	{no authors}. – Translation perspectives 1995
	The translation of children’s literature : a reader / edited by Gillian Lath 2006
	Sociocultural aspects of translating and interpreting / edited by Anthony Py 2006
	Kiraly, Donald C., 1953-. – Pathways to translation : pedagogy and process / Donald C. Kiraly 1995
	CTIS occasional papers 2002
	Kiraly, Donald C., 1953-. – A social constructivist approach to translator education : empowerment from 2000
	A companion to translation studies / edited by Piotr Kuhiwczak and Karin Lit 2007
	Tymoczko, Maria. – Enlarging translation, empowering translators / Maria Tymoczko 2007
	Children’s literature in translation : challenges and strategies / edited by 2006
	Translating poetry : the double labyrinth / edited by Daniel Weissbort 1989
	Venuti, Lawrence, 1953-. – The translator’s invisibility : a history of translation / Lawrence Venuti. – 2nd ed. 2008
	Nation, language, and the ethics of translation / edited by Sandra Bermann a 2005
	Bourdieu and the sociology of translation and Interpreting : special Issue / 2005
	Bowker, Lynne. – Computer-aided translation technology : a practical introduction / Lynne Bow 2002
	Critical readings in translation studies / edited by Mona Baker 2010
	Translating others / edited by Theo Hermans 2006
	Diáz-Cintas, Jorge. – Audiovisual translation : subtitling / Jorge Diáz Cintas & Aline Remael 2007
	Luyken, Georg-Michael. – Overcoming language barriers in television : dubbing and subtitling for the 1991
	{no authors}. – The Manipulation of literature : studies in literary translation / edited by 1985
	Kelly, Dorothy. – A handbook for translator trainers : a guide to reflective practice / Doroth 2005
	Wagner, Emma. – Translating for the European Union institutions / Emma Wagner, Svend Bech, J 2002
	Boase-Beier, Jean. – Stylistic approaches to translation / Jean Boase-Beier 2006
	Niranjana, Tejaswini, 1958-. – Siting translation : history, post-structuralism, and the colonial context / 1992
	{no authors}. – Translation research and interpreting research : traditions, gaps and synerg 2004
	{no authors}. – Translation and cultural change : studies in history, norms and image-projec 2005
	{no authors}. – Translation, power, subversion / edited by Román Álvarez and M. Carmen-Áfric 1996
	{no authors}. – Translators through history / edited and directed by Jean Delisle, Judith Wo 1995

Investment, profit, and tenancy the jurists and the Roman agrarian economy

Author: by Kehoe, Dennis P..

Published: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c1997.

Physical description: xiv, 269 p. ; 24 cm.

ISBN: 0472108026

Notes: Spine title: Investment, profit, and tenancy.
Includes index.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-260) and index.

Summary:

“In Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy Dennis P. Kehoe defines the economic mentality of upper-class Romans by analyzing the assumptions that Roman jurists in the Digest of Justinian made about investment and profit in agriculture as they addressed legal issues involving private property. In particular the author analyzes the duties of guardians in managing the property of their wards and the bequeathing of agricultural property. He bases his analysis on Roman legal sources, which offer a comprehensive picture of the economic interests of upper-class Romans. Farm tenancy was crucial to these interests and Kehoe carefully examines how Roman landowners contended with the legal, social, and economic institutions surrounding farm tenancy as they pursued security from their agricultural investments.” “Investment, Profit, and Tenancy will be of interest to students of Roman history, particularly the legal, social, and economic history of the Roman empire.”–BOOK JACKET.

Subject

SALT Recommendations

	Pliny, the Elder. – Natural history 1950
	Neeve, P. W. de. – Colonus : private farm-tenancy in Roman Italy during the Republic and the ea 1984
	{no authors}. – The Cambridge economic history of the Greco-Roman world / edited by Walter S 2007
	MacDonald, George, 1862-1940. – The Roman wall in Scotland / by Sir George Macdonald. – 2d. ed., rev., enl., and in great part rewritten 1934
	Andreau, Jean. – Banking and business in the Roman world / Jean Andreau / translated by Janet 1999
	{no authors}. – A companion to the Roman army / edited by Paul Erdkamp 2007
	Garnsey, Peter. – Cities, peasants and food in classical antiquity : essays in social and econ 1998
	Paoli, Ugo Enrico, 1884-1963. – Rome : its people, life and customs / translated from the Italian by R. D. M 1990
	{no authors}. – Money, labour and land in ancient Greece : approaches to the economies of an 2002
	Millett, Paul. – Lending and borrowing in ancient Athens / Paul Millett 1991
	{no authors}. – Women in Greece and Rome 1977
	Duncan-Jones, Richard. – The economy of the Roman Empire : quantitative studies 1974
	Duncan-Jones, Richard. – The economy of the Roman Empire : quantitative studies. – 2nd ed 1982
	Birley, Eric. – Roman Britain and the Roman Army : collected papers 1976
	Greene, Kevin. – The archaeology of the Roman economy 1986
	Plutarch. – Greek lives : a selection of nine Greek lives / Plutarch / translated by Rob 1998
	Birley, Eric. – Roman Britain and the Roman army : collected papers 1953
	Stambaugh, John E. – The ancient Roman city 1988
	{no authors}. – Slavery and other forms of unfree labour / edited by Léonie J. Archer 1988
	Camp, John McK. – The archaeology of Athens / John M. Camp 2001
	Duncan-Jones, Richard. – Structure and scale in the Roman economy / Richard Duncan-Jones 1990
	Holder, P. A.. – The Roman army in Britain 1982
	Lintott, Andrew, 1936-. – Violence in republican Rome 1968
	{no authors}. – Athenian democracy / edited by P. J. Rhodes 2004
	Cohen, Edward E.. – The Athenian nation / Edward E. Cohen 2000
	MacMullen, Ramsay, 1928-. – Roman government’s response to crisis, AD 235-337 1976
	{no authors}. – The ancient economy / edited by Walter Scheidel and Sitta von Reden 2002
	Garnsey, Peter. – Famine and food supply in the Graeco-Roman world : responses to risk and cri 1988
	Mouritsen, Henrik. – Plebs and politics in the late Roman Republic 2001
	Jones, A. H. M. (Arnold Hugh Martin), 1904-1970. – The Roman economy : studies in ancient economic and administrative history / 1974
	Millar, Fergus. – The Roman Near East, 31 B.C.-A.D. 337 1993
	{no authors}. – Law and social status in classical Athens / edited by Virginia Hunter and Jo 2000
	Lysias. – Lysias / translated by S.C. Todd 2000
	Andrewes, Antony. – The Greek tyrants 1956
	Manville, Philip Brook. – The origins of citizenship in ancient Athens; Philip Brook Manville 1990
	Cornell, Tim. – The beginnings of Rome : Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic War 1995
	Todd, S. C., Stephen Charles, 1958-. – The shape of Athenian law / S. C. Todd 1993
	{no authors}. – The Cambridge ancient history, 1970-2005
	Cartledge, Paul. – The Greeks : a portrait of self and others / Paul Cartledge 1993
	Finley, M. I., Moses I., 1912-1986. – The ancient economy. – 2nd ed 1985

Luxury and pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain

Author: by Berg, Maxine, 1950-.

Published: Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005.

Physical description: xvii, 373 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cm.

ISBN:

Notes:

Title from e-book title screen (viewed June 17, 2008).
Includes bibliographical references (p. 332-356) and index.
Also available online.
Electronic reproduction. UK : MyiLibrary, 2008 Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to MIL affiliated libraries.
Dates of available copies: 2005, 2007.

Contents

Part 1: Luxury, Quality, and Delight — 1. The Delights of Luxury — 2. Goods from the East — 3. Invention, Imitation, and Design — Part 2: How it was Made — 4. Glass and Chinaware: The Grammar of the Polite Table — 5. Metal Things: Useful Devices and Agreeable Trinkets — Part 3: A Nation of Shoppers — 6. The Middling Classes: Acquisitiveness and Self-Respect — 7. ‘Shopping is a Place to Go’: Fashion, Shopping, and Advertising — 8. Mercantile Theatres: British Commodities and American Consumers.

Summary

Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain’s urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the eighteenth century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities,and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new wants.This unparalleled ‘product revolution’ provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a ‘new luxury’, one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain is cultural history at its best, built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. Maxine Berg traces how this new consumer society of the eighteenth century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialization itself. Global markets for the consumer goods of private and domestic life inspired the industrial revolution and British products ‘won the world’.

Review

…deserves to be the final word on the luxury debate in Britian Martyn Powell, Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature Luxury and Pleasure is an interesting, accessible and well-illustrated synthesis of new research and recent writing, and helpfully concludes by pointing to further areas of research Hannah Smith, History Journal Readers will find this book valuable Joyce Burnette, English Historical Review

Subject

SALT Recommendations

	Crowley, John E.. – The invention of comfort : sensibilities & design in early modern Britain & 2000
	Estabrook, Carl B.. – Urbane and rustic England : cultural ties and social spheres in the province 1998
	Wahrman, Dror. – The making of the modern self : identity and culture in eighteenth-century E 2004
	{no authors}. – The Cambridge history of science 2003
	New Perspectives in the History of Geology (Conference : 1977 : New Hall, Cambri. – Images of the Earth : essays in the history of the environmental sciences / 1979
	Jordanova, L. J.. – Nature displayed : gender, science and medicine 1760-1820 / essays by Ludmil 1999
	Barker, Hannah. – The business of women : female enterprise and urban development in Northern 2006
	Barker-Benfield, G. J.. – The culture of sensibility : sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain 1992
	Zheng, Yangwen. – The social life of opium in China / Yangwen Zheng 2005
	Vickery, Amanda. – The gentleman’s daughter : women’s lives in Georgian England / Amanda Vicker 1998
	McPhee, Peter, 1948-. – The French Revolution, 1789-1799 2002

	{no authors}. – The Social life of things : commodities in cultural perspective / edited by 1986

Title: The nature of human values

Author: by Rokeach, Milton..

Published: New York : Free Press ; London : Collier-Macmillan, 1973.

Physical description: x,438p. ; 24cm.

ISBN: 0029267501

Notes:

Includes index and bibliography: p. 341-354.
Bibl.: p.341-354. – Index.

Subject

SALT Recommendations

	Scheibe, Karl E.. – Beliefs and values 1970
	Rokeach, Milton, 1918-. – Beliefs, attitudes and values : a theory of organization and change 1970
	Field, Andy. – Discovering statistics using SPSS for Windows : advanced techniques for the 2000

Textile production at 16-22 Coppergate

Author: by Walton Rogers, Penelope..

Series

The Archaeology of York ; vol.17 : The small finds, fasc.11
The Archaeology of York. 17, The small finds ; fasc.11
Archaeology of York. fasc.11.

Published: York : Published for the York Archaeological Trust by Council for British Archaeology, 1997.

Physical description: viii, p. 1687-1867 : ill., (some col), maps ; 25 cm.

ISBN

Notes:

Published in association with the York Archaeological Trust.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 1863-1867) and index.
Published in association with the York Archaeological Trust.
In English.

Summary

A great deal of material was recovered from Coppergate during archaeological excavations. Of 1147 artefa cts found there, 1006 are from the 9th to 13th centuries and nearly 700 are from the Anglo-Scandinavian period. Many rel ate to the textile industry ‘

Subject

Other names

York Archaeological Trust.
Council for British Archaeology.

SALT Recommendations

	{no authors}. – The Archaeology of York / (general editor, P.V. Addyman) 1989
	J›rgensen, Lise Bender. – North European textiles until AD 1000 1992
	Hald, Margrethe, b. 1897. – Ancient Danish textiles from bogs and burials : a comparative study of costu 1980
	Barber, E. J. W., 1940-. – Prehistoric textiles : the development of cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze 1991
	Wild, John Peter. – Textiles in archaeology 1988
	{no authors}. – The archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England : basic readings / edited by Catherin 1999
	Fletcher, Mike, 1943-. – Digging numbers : elementary statistics for archaeologists / Mike Fletcher a 1991
	{no authors}. – The Age of Sutton Hoo : the seventh century in north-western Europe / edited 1992
	{no authors}. – The archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England / edited by David M. Wilson 1976
	{no authors}. – Historical archaeology : back from the edge / edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funar 1999
	Hodder, Ian. – Reading the past : current approaches to interpretation in archaeology. – 2nd ed 1991
	{no authors}. – Engendering archaeology : women and prehistory / edited by Joan M. Gero and 1991
	Dickinson, O. T. P. K., Oliver Thomas Pilkington Kirwan. – The Aegean Bronze Age 1994
	Thomas, David Hurst. – Archaeology. – 3rd ed. 1998
	{no authors}. – The Function of the Minoan palaces : proceedings of the fourth International 1987
	Parker Pearson, Michael, 1957-. – The archaeology of death and burial / Mike Parker Pearson 1999
	{no authors}. – Interpretative archaeology / edited by Christopher Tilley 1993
	{no authors}. – Architecture and order : approaches to social space / Michael Parker Pearson 1994
	Johnson, Matthew. – Archaeological theory : an introduction / Matthew Johnson 1999
	{no authors}. – Interpretive archaeology : a reader / edited by Julian Thomas 2000

The benefits of reusing activity data

Posted on July 21, 2011 by joypalmer

Recommender function in Copac -- prototype

A working prototype based on just 5 weeks of data from John Rylands UL

July is proving to be a fast and furious month in terms of presenting on SALT, crunching the remainder of the gargantuan amount of data we’re receiving from our partners at JRUL, finessing the API, implementing the developments in the Copac prototype (and showing it off to people at the CILIP Umbrella conference), and running various workshops and user testing sessions to test our hypothesis (as much as we can in this time frame) and see whether the ‘shared service’ side of all this might actually scale.

We’re working intensely, but reflecting too. The workshop hosted by the RISE project earlier this month was an excellent opportunity to step back and see the bigger picture, and reflect on the benefits we’re aiming to realise for libraries and their users. A reminder of what we’re attempting to find out:

Hypothesis…

Library circulation activity data can be used to support humanities research by surfacing underused ‘long tail’ library materials through search

Also… how sustainable would an API-based national shared service be?

And can such a service support users and also library workflows such as collections management?

What we already know
We know that arts and humanities students and academics borrow books.

Research conducted in-house by Mimas, and also by others (for example Carole Palmer ) also highlights the differences in search methodologies between this demographic and their STEM counterparts. In short, humanities researchers tend to search centrifugally, ‘berry picking’ from various trails. Mimas’ recent research with Mindset and Curtis and Cartwright indicates that newer postgraduates tend to work in quite an isolated way – asking few if any for advice on where to search (supervisors feature heavily in this regard, whereas subject librarians do not at all) and sticking with a few ‘known’ resources). While these users are typically suspicious of the idea that allowing other users to annotate, tag, or rate items would be of benefit to them, there is generally a positive response when asked about the usefulness of a recommender function; in fact Amazon is used significantly in this regard to help users find related materials that are not surfacing through a ‘traditional’ library search.

Library recommendation systems are already achieving benefits for undergraduates – University of Huddersfield being the obvious example. Indeed, Huddersfield’s system helps students move beyond the ‘nose’ to the long tail of library collections – and there is some evidence that new borrowing patterns are emerging, with students taking out books from outside what is assigned. In humanities research especially, the long tail is obviously much more relevant.

The benefits
So what additional benefits might we realise through this work, especially if we move on t

o aggregating data from additional libraries?

Key to our hypothesis is the belief that such systems can help surface and hopefully increase the usage of hidden collections. Obviously circulation data is only going to offer a partial solution to this problem of discoverability (i.e. many ‘hidden gems’ are of course non-circulating) but nonetheless, we believethat the long tail argument borne out by Chris Anderson can also hold true for libraries – that the collective ‘share’ or recommendation of items can turn the Pareto Principle on its head. For libraries this means being able to demonstrate the value of the collections by pointing to increased usage. It might also give libraries a better sense of what is of value to users, and what perhaps is not.
For users, particularly those in the humanities, a recommender function can help providing new routes to discovery based on use and disciplinary contexts (not traditional classification). In other words, what you areviewing through ‘recommenders’ are patterns of real usage, how other users with similar academic interests are aggregating texts. This is particularly useful for finding conceptually related groupings of texts that cut across differentdisciplines, and which will not ordinarily sit together in a standard results set.
It also means we can support humanities users in their preferred mode of discovery, powering ‘centrifugal searching’ and discovery through serendipity. The downstream benefits of this concern the emergence of new, original research, new knowledge and ideas.

Last week we sat down with a group of collections managers from JRUL as well as Leeds University and talked with them about other possible benefits related to library workflows which we weren’t yet seeing. Here are the potential benefits we came up with:

Aggregated activity data could support activities such as stock weeding by revealing collection strengths and allowing librarians to cross check against other collections.
By combining aggregated collection data and aggregated activity data, librarians will see a fuller picture. This means they can identify collection strengths and recognise items that should be retained because of association with valued collections. We thought about this as a form of “stock management by association.” Librarians might treat some long-tail items (e.g. items with limited borrowing) with caution if they were aware of links/associations to other collections (although there is also the caveat that this wouldn’t be possible with local activity data reports in isolation)
Aggregated activity data could have benefits for collection development. Seeing the national picture might allow librarians to identify related items – “if your collection has this, it should also have…”
This could also inform the number of copies a library should buy, and which books from reading lists are required in multiple copies.
Thinking more outside the box, we thought it might also inform digitization decision-making – i.e. if you digitized this, you might also consider digitizing…
Aggregated activity data could inform stock purchase – allow librarians to see what’s new, what’s being used elsewhere and therefore what’s worth buying.
This could also have benefits when discussing reading lists and stock purchases with academic staff, and thus enhance academic engagement

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll have quite a bit more to report as we analyse sustainability issues with other libraries, and perhaps most importantly, put the recommender itself in front of postgraduate humanities researchers to see if our hypothesis is likely to be proven true — at least based on what they tell us (the true test will happen over the next year as we monitor impact via JRUL and Copac).

See SALT – a demo

Posted on June 16, 2011 by dchaplin70

A further set of sample data from JRUL, comprising 100,000 loan transactions this time, has been processed and used to test a prototype web API. Signs are encouraging.

The process begins with data being extracted from the Talis library management system (LMS) at JRUL in CSV format. This data is parsed by a PHP script which separates the data into two tables in a MySQL database, the bibliographic details describing an item go into a table called items and the loan specific data, including borrower ID, goes into a table called, you’ve guessed it, loans. A further PHP script then processes the data into two additional MySQL tables, nloans and nborrowers; nloans contains the total number of times each item has been borrowed, and nborrowers contains, for each combination of two items, a count of the unique number of library users to have borrowed both items.

With the above steps complete, additional processing is performed on demand by the web API. When called for a given item, say item_1, the API returns a list of items for suggested reading, where this list is derived as follows. From the nborrowers table a list of items is compiled from all combinations featuring item_1. For each item in this list the number of unique borrowers, from the nborrowers table, is divided by the total number of loans for that item, from the nloans table, following the logic used by Dave Pattern at the University of Huddersfield. The resulting values are ranked in descending order and the details associated with each suggested item are returned by the API.

For a bit of light relief here’s an image.

This is a screenshot from a piece of code written to demonstrate the web API. For a given item, identified by the ISBN, the details are retrieved from the items table in the MySQL database and displayed in [A]. An asynchronous call is made to the web API that accepts the ISBN as a parameter, along with threshold and format values which are set using the controls in [B]; threshold is the minimum number of unique borrowers that any given combination of items must have to be considered, and format specifies how the returned data is required (either xml or json). Results from the web API are displayed in [C], with the actual output from the API reproduced in [D]. Note that all available results are returned by the API but the test code only shows the number set by the third control in [B].

The exact format of the output is yet to be ratified but the API is in a state where it can now be incorporated into prototype interfaces at JRUL and in COPAC. In addition the remaining 3 million or so loan transactions from JRUL will be loaded and processed in readiness for user testing.

What do the library users think?

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Lisa Charnock

As the SALT project and the Activity Data programme progresses, I’m finding the results of the various user engagement exercises really interesting. As Janine’s already mentioned, we’re planning a structured user evaluation of our recommender tool with subject librarians and researchers, but before that we wanted to talk to some students to test some of our assumptions and understand library users experiences a little better.

So, last week I took myself off to the JRUL and interviewed four students (three postgraduates and one undergraduate). In the main, I was (of course) interested in their opinions about recommenders, and whether they would find such a tool useful in the JRUL library catalogue and in Copac. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that researchers would find the introduction of a recommender beneficial (not least from the other blogs on this programme), but what would the Manchester students and researchers think? I was also interested in their research behaviour – did they always know exactly what they were looking for, or did they do subject and keyword searches? And finally, I wanted to sound them out about privacy.

So what did they tell me?

On recommendations

There was varied use of recommenders through services like Amazon, but all of the students could see the potential of getting recommendations through the library catalogue, Copac, and eventually through the Library Search (powered by Primo). There were some concerns about distractions, with one student worried that she would spend her limited research time following a never ending cycle of recommendations that took her further and further away from her original purpose. However, the biggest concerns from all four was the possibility of irrelevant material being pushed to them – something that they would all find frustrating. A recommender could certainly help to widen reading choices, but all of them wanted to know how we were going to make sure that the suggestions were relevant. I noticed that the postgraduate focus group participants in the Rise focus groups needed to trust the information, and were interested to know where the recommendation has come from. It’s clear that trust is a big issue, and this is something we’ll definitely be re-visiting when we run the user evaluation workshops.

On research behaviour

On the whole, the participants knew what they were looking for when they opened the catalogue, and suggestions of material came from the usual suspects – supervisors, tutors, citations, or specific authors they needed to read. All of them felt that recommendations would be interesting and especially useful during extended research projects such as dissertations. However, what was most interesting to me was that, although they all said they would be interested to look at the suggestions, they all seemed unconvinced they would actually borrow the recommended books because they, on the whole, visited the catalogue in order to find specific items. So what does this mean for our hypothesis – that using circulation data can support research by surfacing underused library materials? These students didn’t have the opportunity to try the recommender, so you could argue that some scepticism is inevitable, and Hudderfield’s experience suggests that underused books will resurface. However, again we need to explore this further once we can show some students a working prototype.

On privacy

I wasn’t sure whether privacy would be an issue, but none of the students I spoke to had any concerns about the library collecting circulation data and using it to power recommendations. They considered this to be a good use of the data, as long as anonymity was taken into consideration. On the whole, the students’ responses backed up the findings of the 2008 Developing Personalisation for the Information Environment Final Report, which found that “students place their trust in their college or university. They either think that they have no alternative to disclosing information to their institution, or believe that the institution will not misuse the information.” They felt that, by introducing a recommender, the library was doing “a good thing” by trying to improve their search experience. No concerns here.

Next Steps

Obviously, this was only the views of four students, and we need to do more work to test the usefulness of the tool. We’re now planning the user testing and evaluation of the recommender prototype, and recruiting postgraduate humanities researchers to take part. As Janine outlined, we’ll be introducing the tool to subject librarians at JRUL and humanities researchers to see if the recommendations are meaningful and useful.

I’m looking forward to finding out what they think, and we’ll let you know the results in a later blog post.