[Koha] patron book reviews/suggestions, desirable koha enhancement?

[Emile Snyder]

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 at katipo.co.nz           PO Box 12487, Wellington
> http://www.katipo.co.nz              New Zealand
> Koha Open Source Library System
> http://www.koha.org
>