On Wed, 21 Nov 2001, Rachel Hamilton-Williams wrote:
We've had some thoughts along similar lines - but on the basis of people who borrowed this book also borrowed XYZ.
Where XYZ is a book that more than one person who borrowed book "A" also borrowed. Obviously we don't want to just hand out peoples reading lists.
Does that sound like a good idea? Reviews are kinda cool, but also would require checking etc by library staff (to make sure they are not obscene etc) so I suspect might be a bit high maintenance.
The downside of "people who borrowed X also borrowed Y" is that borrowing is much more loosley coupled to liking than an actual review. It is better than nothing I think, and is more closely related to amazon's "people who bought X also bought Y". I can see the maintenence issues with full text reviews. The suggest-a-book benefits actually need a rating (ie "I give it a 4 on a scale of 1-5" or something), which is easily decoupled from a full text review, and less problematic from the screening user input standpoint. It's a shame to loose the text review purely due to inappropriate content concerns; perhaps a filter rejecting reviews containing any of a "banned words list" is enough? In terms of patron privacy (not handing out peoples borrowing lists) I was thinking that you could generate a reviewer id as, say, the SHA hash of the patron id. This makes it easy to do "people that liked/borrowed X also liked/borrowed Y" queries, but hard to do "review/borrowing Z was submitted/done by patron A". Also, if all you instead used SHA(patronid,library info) as the reviewid, then you would get unique review id's across libraries as well, allowing shared review data sets. thanks for the feedback, -emile
Look forward to your thoughts
Cheers Rachel
_____________________________________________________________
Rachel Hamilton-Williams Katipo Communications WEBMISTRESS ph 021 389 128 or +64 04 934 1285 mailto:rachel@katipo.co.nz PO Box 12487, Wellington http://www.katipo.co.nz New Zealand Koha Open Source Library System http://www.koha.org