patron book reviews/suggestions, desirable koha enhancement?
Hello all, I'm not involved with any library (other than as a patron of my local county system), just lurking on the Koha list because I think it's a cool project. I was hoping that people who are involved with running koha in real library settings could comment on the perceived pros and cons of a "review and suggestions" enhancement to the koha database, a'la amazon.com. I have found myself increasingly using amazon.com as a source of feedback about books in a variety of situations; both when I'm considering a book to buy, or when I'm looking through our community library collection and wondering what books to check out. Having the reviews available is good, but I find the "people who liked this book also liked XYZ" to be really addictive. I can follow chains of related books this way, reading reviews as I go, and find some interesting things that I never would have come to on my own. I realize that there is a fairly large critical mass of reviews that must be present in a system before this really works, and I've been thinking about various ways one could share review collections between libraries. Before I get too into db schemas and appropriate SQL queries, are there some downsides to having this in the system that people anticipate? Or different review'ish schemes that seem more helpful? thanks, -emile
Hi Emile, Lovely to have you on the list.
I realize that there is a fairly large critical mass of reviews that must be present in a system before this really works, and I've been thinking about various ways one could share review collections between libraries. Before I get too into db schemas and appropriate SQL queries, are there some downsides to having this in the system that people anticipate? Or different review'ish schemes that seem more helpful?
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. 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
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
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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
participants (2)
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Emile Snyder -
Rachel Hamilton-Williams