Shake Your HIPs!

Shake Your HIPs!

Dave Pattern – [email protected] University of Huddersfieldhttp://www.daveyp.com/lincoln/

“Just shake your hips Do the hip shake, babe!”

(Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street)

12/07/2006 http://www.daveyp.com/lincoln/

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What is this session about?

share ideas and “plant seeds” explore the possibilities and limitations of

what can be done with HIP 3 and Horizon 7 maybe ponder the future of the OPAC? there’s over 50 slides, so we might not get

through everything unless I go like the clappers!!!


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What will the session cover?

borrowing suggestions “did you mean” spelling suggestions serendipity keyword suggestions keyword search email alerts RSS library account feeds lending history graphs web services – REST interface and a9.com some other silly stuff


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The Disclaimer…

SirsiDynix does not provide support for any changes to the XSL stylesheets:

“Dynix does not accept any responsibility for damage caused by the changes that you choose to make to your Information Portal system, unless you make the change using the supported Information Portal Administration tool.”

(HIP User Interface Customization Guide)


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Why make changes to your HIP? add new features remove existing features that you don’t

need improve HIP usability & tweak the user

experience …because it’s good fun! ;-)


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Always take precautions…

set up a test server connect it to your test database… …or connect it your live database, but only run

the XSL Processor & JBoss Server add a footer to warn people it’s your test HIP

back up your XSL files before any making changes

add HTML style comments to all changes:


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Borrowing suggestions


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Borrowing suggestions

Why? users are familiar with Amazon’s “people who

bought this, also bought these…” users like to browse the book a user wants might not always be

available it supports serendipity Ranganathan’s 2nd & 3rd Laws of Library

Science: “Every reader his or her book. Every book its

reader.”


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Borrowing suggestions – how? we use Ajax to insert the suggestions into

the rendered HIP pages “people who borrowed this item…”

based on data mining historical circulation data “similar subject headings…”

based on LCSH “other editions…”

uses the OCLC xISBN web service to locate other editions


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Making your Circ data work harder! Huddersfield has a “circ_tran” table

containing over 2,000,000 circulation transactions from a 10 year period

we used “data mining” techniques to explore that data: “Data mining can be defined as the nontrivial extraction

of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data”

suggestions need to be created in advance, as it takes several hours to process the entire table


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Making your Circ data work harder!1) start with a book2) find everyone who’s ever borrowed it3) find all the books they’ve ever borrowed4) find the most commonly borrowed books

from that subgroup5) suggest books that more than X people

borrowed

Privacy is important – make sure that X is as large as possible!


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Other editions

use OCLCs xISBN web service to locate other editions: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/xisbn/ http://labs.oclc.org/xisbn/0443064229

you need to be able to check ISBNs quickly for this to be effective in real-time, otherwise you could cache lookup results


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Other ways of doing it?

use Amazon Web Services to bring in their suggestions

use high number of CKOs to provide suggestions

store details of items CKOd at the same time and use those to build suggestions


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Borrowing suggestions - worth it? very positive feedback from users! useful when all copies of a suggested title

are on loan useful for browsing around the fringes of a

subject useful for locating the latest editions of

books could be used to make suggestions based

on a borrower’s entire loan history?


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Borrowing Suggestions - statistics “also borrowed”

average ~1000 clicks per weekday during term time

“similar subjects” average ~800 clicks per weekday during term

time “other editions”

average ~350 clicks per weekday during term time


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Spelling Suggestions


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Spelling Suggestions

Why? because it’s 2006 and the UK HIP still doesn’t

have a “did you mean?” feature! the slightly patronising “Check your spelling”

error message annoys me! one of the basic rules of web site design is to

avoid “dead ends” – they just frustrate the user according to our logs, 23% of all keyword

searches were giving zero results


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Spelling Suggestions – how?

uses the open source Aspell spell checker: http://aspell.sourceforge.net/

uses custom wordlists/dictionaries compiled from the relevant Horizon tables

the suggestions are “index sensitive” Ajax is used to squeeze the suggestions

into the “zero results” page session ID and profile information is also

included in the suggestion links


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Spelling Suggestions – worth it? DEFINITELY YES!!! “did you means” get up to 2000 clicks per

day we have a large number of Nursing

students who regularly search the OPAC for medical terms

however, beware that suggestions might highlight the typos in your bib records…


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Some Common Bib Typos…

“mangement” Huddersfield: 12

Lincoln: 5 Nottingham Trent: 10

British Library: 248

“univeristy” Huddersfield: 33

Lincoln: 1 Nottingham Trent: 32 British Library: 327

“sussessful” ?!? …I’ll get me coat!!! see “Typographical errors in library

databases”


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Serendipity Keyword Suggestions


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Serendipity Keyword Suggestions Why?

users often enter keywords that are too specific and get zero results (e.g. diuretic)

users don’t always enter the best keywords there’s not always a member of library staff

nearby to give suggestions and help out user expectations are much higher now – you

can type a question in AskJeeves, so why not OPAC? e.g.

what is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?


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Keyword Suggestions – how?

for zero result searches, run the keywords against other resources – e.g. answers.com

harvest useful keywords and (if possible) confirm there are matches on the catalogue

cons: difficult to do quickly in real-time, and suggestions may

be irrelevant or too broad we have no control over the suggestions


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Keyword Suggestions – worth it? possibly maybe! we think giving the user some potentially

useful suggestions is better than nothing at all

the way we’ve done it is a fairly ugly hack, but for a first attempt it’s not bad

…wouldn’t it be great if the OPAC really did understand what you were trying to search for and could give you relevant suggestions?


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usage - cumulative clicks by hour of day (100 day period)


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Keyword Search Email Alerts


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Keyword Search Email Alerts

subscribe to specific keyword searches in HIP

whenever relevant new items are added to the catalogue, the user is sent an email with full details


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Keyword Search Email Alerts – how? a couple of small Perl scripts:

one CGI script to set up a new alert second automated script which processes all existing

alerts and sends email when new matches are found

both scripts make use of the ability of HIP to output XML instead of HTML: append “&GetXML=true” to end of HIP URL

went live on Sunday, so no feedback yet over 2100 patrons have signed up to a

similar scheme at Hennepin County Library


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RSS Library Account Feeds - RSS


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RSS Library Account Feeds

RSS is supposed to be the “Next Big Thing”!

Library Account information / overview: items on loan items due back soon or overdue items on hold request items ready to collect outstanding fines

due to go live before September 2006


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RSS Library Account Feeds - formatted…


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RSS Library Account Feeds - Bloglines…


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RSS Library Account Feeds – how? mod_perl script runs against live Horizon

database each feed URL is encrypted and the feed

data itself is anonymous https://library.hud.ac.uk/rss/

689630bef948576c67d3029cbe1908

each RSS feed request is cached for an hour to avoid heavy database usage

we still need to fully integrate the feeds into the HIP borrower information pages


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RSS Library Account Feeds - worth it? fingers crossed it will be! previous developments have shown that

students prefer to get information “pushed” to them (e.g. pre-overdue emails)

RSS is extremely flexible and the end user can decide how and where to display the feed e.g. University portal, RSS via SMS, Bloglines, Firefox

web browser, Internet Explorer 7, etc we hope to add more RSS feeds to HIP soon…


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Lending History Graphs


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Lending History Graphs

generated from “circ_tran” table data only viewable in HIP on the Library Staff

subnet used for stock editing


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Lending History Graphs – how? graphs created by Perl script using GD

Graphics Library data fetched in real time from “circ_tran”

table (contains 10 years of circulation transactions)


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Lending History Graphs – worth it? good feedback from staff we’re considering adding more “staff only”

information to HIP


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Web Services - REST


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Web Services - REST

why? provides an alternative method of getting at our

bib data we can include extra data which isn’t available in

HIP we have lots of students who could do cool things

with the library data – Art & Design and Computing students are typically infrequent users of the library

help support mashups and promote “unintended uses”

REST + XSL = accessible OPAC!


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Web Services – a9.com OpenSearch


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Web Services – a9.com OpenSearch why?

provides an alternative search interface to the OPAC

why force people to come to the OPAC when they want to search for things?

OpenSearch is fully supported in Internet Explorer 7


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OpenSearch in IE7


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OpenSearch in IE7 – add provider


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OpenSearch in IE7 – search targets


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OpenSearch in IE7 – sample search


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Web Services – how?

both rely on being able to get XML versions of pages from HIP (i.e. append “GetXML=true”)

REST XML from HIP converted into REST style XML http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/59/

OpenSearch XML from HIP converted to a9.com compatible RSS

feed http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/70/


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Web Services – worth it?

I think so we need to move towards pushing our

data out into other applications and interfaces

at least one new 2006-7 course plans to include tasks which will use library data


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Dewey DNA Profile

visualisation of check outs over a specific period, grouped by Dewey classification (code available here)

inspired by Seattle Public Library’s “Making Visible the Invisible”


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Word Splat!

turn your latest check outs into a work of art ;-)

takes random words from the titles of the most recently checked out items


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HIP Searches live Ajax visualisation of keyword searches on

HIP


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Piles of Books

50 most recent check outs overdue books most recent requests


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Phew! The End! Any questions?

Documents

Shake Your HIPs!