Can personalised be upscaled?

Can personalised be upscaled?
Tim Wales
Associate 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
Technology can help every library offer a boutique service
Web technologies and associated data already offer mass personalization at scale
There are comparable commercial services that we must benchmark against
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
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?
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Source: Priestner & Tilley (2010)

3 suppliers evaluated for a pilot

Why EBL?

Best user interface
Free 5 minute preview access of every book
Flexible configuration options e.g. excluding titles
Ability to specify # of loans before purchase triggered
Various purchase approval options
No upfront payment required
Works with SFX and EZProxy
(Horrendous invoicing problems)
July 2010 – Nov 2010

RHUL pilot details
£10,000 funding
Ran in November 2010
Some basic weeding of title list
30,000 EBL records preloaded into Aleph LMS
Free 5 min preview enabled
1 day loans (rentals)
1st 3 clicks = loans, 4th = purchase
No cap on book purchase price
(busy time)
Removing school texts
Wanted 150,000
5-15% of book price
Unmediated
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
5% of trial EBL load
3% 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
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½
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
?
Source: Priestner & Tilley (2010)

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

Future RHUL Discovery
+
= Personalization
=

RHUL Discovery
Discovery system used by Huddersfield and Liverpool (good interface & price)
Software as a service
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)
Data from Summon API + SFX4 API + Aleph LMS X-Server / restful API
Much customisation
Consolidates 3 interfaces
Web 2.0 functions

Vanilla interface home

Library home page | Library log-in
By subject
By format
By language
By type
Eresources A-Z
Journals A-Z
Future interface home
Guided search
Includes: archives, audio-visual materials, print and e-books, print and e-journals, exam papers, newspapers and open access research
Browse
Do more
Contact us
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@rhul.ac.uk
Tel: 01784 443323
Feedback form
There is a delay between resources being entered into the library systems and uploaded to LibrarySearch. If you cannot find printed material you are expecting to see, please try the Library Catalogue

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

Chapter X - Can personalised be upscaled?
Tim Wales
What else do
you think this chapter should cover?

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

References
Amazon, www.amazon.com
Breeding, Marshall (2010) State of the Art in Library Discovery 2010. Available from: bit.ly/g2dCUZ
EBL, www.eblib.com
Priestner, Andy & Tilley, Elizabeth (2010) Boutique libraries at your service Library & Information Update (July). Available from: bit.ly/ercZgn
Summon, www.serialssolutions.com/summon
Vufind, vufind.org

Final thought

Can personalised be upscaled?

by Tim Wales

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