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Dave's Law
I’d love to have a law named after me, so here goes: Dave’s Law users should not have to become mini-librarians in order to use the library If you ever find yourself needing to invoke Dave’s Law,...
View ArticleA week on Summon
[ update: slightly revised stats are available here! ] We’ve just started collecting in-depth data about how students are searching Summon (keywords entered, facets selected, etc) and I thought some of...
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A week on Summon (revisited)
After yesterday’s blog post, I thought I’d have a go at narrowing down my definition of a “separate search”. If a user enters some search terms, and then uses 2 facets to refine the search before...
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"Library search tools. Could we make them harder to use?"
Everyone now and then you come across a blog post that really resonsates and this is one: “Library search tools. Could we make them harder to use?” by @carolgauld. I was being cheeky when I proposed...
View ArticlePlease give generously…
The Boolean Sanctuary is a UK charity run by librarians, working to protect neglected & homeless Boolean Operators. Please give generously. — Dave Pattern (@daveyp) April 28, 2012 … The Boolean...
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The Magic Microphone and the Horrible Headphones
A while back, I had a daft idea to try and use all of the library circulation and graduate attainment data to pinpoint which books were the ones most likely to be borrowed by high achieving students,...
View ArticleOperation Dump the OPAC
If you follow me on Twitter (@daveyp), you’ll probably know already that we’re about to take the plunge and retire our OPAC in favour of using Summon. There are a few drivers behind this, including:...
View ArticleDumping the OPAC #1 – The Project Spec
To go into a little more detail about what we’re hoping to achieve, here’s the project spec. Primarily, we’ll be creating a new library portal (currently dubbed “MyLibrary”) that will provide a bespoke...
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Dumping the OPAC #2 – Usage Data
File this under “things I wished I’d started doing a long time ago”, but we began collecting usage data from Summon a few months back, using a modified version of Matthew Reidsma’s Summon-Stats script....
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The 2nd UK Information Literacy & Summon Day – July 25th
After the success of the first event, held at Sheffield Hallam University last July, we’re pleased to announce that Manchester Metropolitan University Library Services have kindly offered to host the...
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