I know we are using this for reporting back on external events etc but if possible it would be nice to use as a forum for new ideas things we would like to do in the future. They might not come to anything but it might be a nice place to record ideas:-

I was just wondering whether there would be any scope for using comments and rating functionality within reading list software.

Look at customizing the reports within Google Analytics on the LMS

Anna

Visit to Huddersfield Uni - 28th Feb 2010

Angela and myself took a trip across the Pennines to visit Dave Pattern at the University of Huddersfield. The main purpose of the trip was to look at developments on their OPAC but we also talked Summon and repositories.

Dave's added lots of enhancements to their OPAC (Horizon, Sirsi Dynix):

Keyword search tag cloud - on the front page of the OPAC. Shows most popular search terms - very popular at the start of term.

Keyword suggestions - suggestions of other related keywords to include in your search

Stats available to staff - restricted by IP range staff can see loan statistics for the book they are looking at in the catalogue.

People who borrowed this also borrowed.... - following the introduction of this a bigger range of stock has been borrowed, more books have been borrowed and people are renewing less often

Other editions - uses data from Library Thing

Virtual Shelf browse - most popular feature - let's you browse the shelf (by classmark) from the OPAC

Primo Central webinar 9th Feb 2010

Quick recap - Primo Central is an index of scholarly material, hosted and managed by Ex Libris which will be free to Metalib customers. It will be released in the Metalib Knowledgebase in Q3 2010 and will contain articles, ebooks and some other e-content and will index the bib data, abstracts and full text.

The webinar showed that there's a large list of publishers signed up - some such as EBSCO will only be available to subscribers (although it wasn't clear exactly how this will be configured).The info should be up to date - the index will be updated daily for most resources but more often where necessary. Some thing which I hadn't realised is that you will be able to see where each result has come from so can link to that database to do a more in depth search.

The main advantage is that search response will be much faster - rather than having to wait for individual databases to send results it will all be comign from one place.