can personalised be upscaled?

Can personalised be upscaled?

Tim WalesAssociate Director (E-Strategy), Library Services

Royal Holloway, University of London

Personalised libraries in HE symposium, Cambridge (22/03/2011)

Royal Holloway...

Not a boutique library!

Chapter work in progress!

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My beliefs

1. Technology can help every library offer a boutique service

2. Web technologies and associated data already offer mass personalization at scale

3. There are comparable commercial services that we must benchmark against

4. Social media has empowered our users to expect to be in control

2 RHUL case studies

User driven e-book acquisition(Demand driven acquisition)

Discovery systems

DDA and the boutique model

?

Source: Priestner & Tilley (2010)

3 suppliers evaluated for a pilot

Why EBL?

Best user interfaceFree 5 minute preview access of every bookFlexible configuration options e.g. excluding titlesAbility to specify # of loans before purchase triggeredVarious purchase approval optionsNo upfront payment requiredWorks with SFX and EZProxy(Horrendous invoicing problems)

July 2010 – Nov 2010

RHUL pilot details

£10,000 fundingRan in November 2010Some basic weeding of title list30,000 EBL records preloaded

into Aleph LMSFree 5 min preview enabled1 day loans (rentals)1st 3 clicks = loans, 4th = purchaseNo cap on book purchase price

(busy time)Removing school textsWanted 150,000

5-15% of book priceUnmediated

N.B. We deliberately did not market the pilot to test actual user behaviour

RHUL pilot results

50% of titles purchased were already held in print

RHUL pilot results

3% of trial EBL load

5% of trial EBL load

• Highly tailored selection by users – would librarians have chosen those 37 titles?

• Free 5 minute preview accounted for 33% of use so why not just load in thousands of titles into LMS (= iTunes model)?

• Ratio of loans to purchases chosen unsustainable - do we want mediated option?

• Do boutique libraries need to have their own LMS in order to operate this?

Thoughts

2 RHUL case studies

User drive e-book acquisition(Demand driven acquisition)

Discovery systems

Discovery systems

A great discovery interface should operate in a mostly self-explanatory way, allowing users to concentrate on selecting and evaluating the resources returned rather than struggling through the search tools that the library provides.

Explaining the idiosyncrasies of the brand names of the publishers and providers from which we acquire information resources in wholesale often becomes the focus of information literacy and bibliographic instruction.

Since so many library users consume the products we offer from outside our library buildings, having more intuitive tools to deliver library resources that do not require special training represents a valuable advance in the state of the art.

The ability to assemble into a single index all the books, journal articles, and other collection components, in my mind, represents one of the most significant breakthroughs in library automation in recent decades.

Marshall Breeding (2010)

Discovery & the boutique model

Source: Priestner & Tilley (2010)

½

?

Discovery systems

Source: Breeding (2010)

RHUL Discovery now

Summon

• Selected on interface, price and content + Huddersfield feedback

• Software as a service• 8 month implementation• Includes data from Archive

catalogue and IR• Little customisation possible• Yet another interface

Vanilla interface home

Local home

RHUL results page

+

= = Personalization

Future RHUL Discovery

RHUL Discovery

• Discovery system used by Huddersfield and Liverpool (good interface & price)

• Software as a service• 8 month implementation• Data from Summon index, LMS,

Archive catalogue and IR with Openurl links

• Little customisation possible• Yet another interface• No Web 2.0 functions yet

• Discovery layer used by LSE and Swansea (building on our Xerxes experience)

• Open Source (Local install)• 6 month implementation• Data from Summon API +

SFX4 API + Aleph LMS X-Server / restful API

• Much customisation• Consolidates 3 interfaces• Web 2.0 functions

Vanilla interface home

Browse Do more

Book a Library group room

Check your Library account

Check your PIN

Register at Senate House Library

Search Senate House Library

Suggest a book/resource

Top up your printing account

Library home page | Library log-in

Guided search

Contact us

library@rhul.ac.uk

Tel: 01784 443323

Feedback form

Includes: archives, audio-visual materials, print and e-books, print and e-journals, exam papers, newspapers and open access research

By subject

By format

By language

By type

Eresources A-Z

Journals A-Z

Future interface home

Vanilla results page

Library map

Full resource view

Basic Web 2.0

Boutique service benchmark

Benchmarking

Fast, combined search and browse across all resource types

Integrated account management

Reviews and ratings Personalised

recommendations on homepage and by email

Downloadable e-content Regional variations

Fast, combined search and some browsing across all resource types

Integrated account management and sign-on

Reviews and ratings Personalised

recommendations on homepage and by email

Downloadable e-content Regional variations

• Do boutique libraries need to have their own discovery system in the boutique model?

• Do they have the technical staff resource to implement them?

• Can discovery systems index the specialist data/information supplied by boutique libraries (e.g. Company data, statistics, chemical information)

• Or are discovery systems a threat to boutique libraries?

Questions

What else do you think this chapter should

cover?

Chapter X - Can personalised be upscaled? Tim Wales

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/4759535970/tim.wales@rhul.ac.uk@timwales

References

Amazon, www.amazon.comBreeding, Marshall (2010) State of the Art in Library

Discovery 2010. Available from: bit.ly/g2dCUZEBL, www.eblib.comPriestner, Andy & Tilley, Elizabeth (2010) Boutique

libraries at your service Library & Information Update (July). Available from: bit.ly/ercZgn

Summon, www.serialssolutions.com/summonVufind, vufind.org