A catalog with service

Dave Pattern left a comment below noting that the ‘people who borrowed this also borrowed …’ feature on the University of Huddersfield catalogue is now live. I had mentioned it in the context of greater use of ‘intentional’ data in our services, that is data which records choices or intentions. Examples are holdings, circulation and database usage data, which can all be used to tune or augment services. For example, OCLC tends to rank results by number of holdings, which usually works quite well. Libraries may begin to offer recommender services based on usage data. There is a renewed interest in holdings, circulation and ILL data in the context of triage across collections for digitization and off-site storage.
I tried a range of searches and not all have recommendations, presumably because (?) items may not have circulated within the period for which data is available.
Dave has implemented various nice features in this catalog. He gives a ‘permalink‘, so that users can link to the catalogue record. He gives a floorplan with the relevent area marked. In some cases he gives a link to Amazon. He also tells you how many other items are associated with the subject headings in the entry, and clicking on the heading lands you in a browsable list of subjects.
On the test version of the catalog he has incorporated tagging, which he discusses in a recent entry on his blog. (This is shown in the top image.)
Whatever the developing role of the catalogue and its place in the context of the wider discovery environment, it is good to see this type of work which looks to improve the catalogue in sensible ways.
Incidentally, it looks as if the ability to link ‘co-borrowed’ items might be improved if the catalogue were frbrized.
(p.s. I was interested to see that the Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield is Patrick Stewart.)
Related entries:

• Circulating intentional data
• Making data work harder – intentionally
• Making data work: Web 2.0 and catalogs