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20081217 Wednesday December 17, 2008

Revealing libraries

I wonder if library patrons would be interested in seeing a live stream of what kinds of research are going in the library? You've all seen streams of what terms people are putting into search engines, like this. What if somewhere on a library website we showed live streams of:

  • terms patrons are typing into the catalog
  • terms patrons are typing into library site searches
  • books checked out today
  • reference books re-shelved this week
  • Amazon-like "Statistically Improbable Phrases" pulled from chat and email question logs
  • other data we have?
There are enormous privacy problems here. I write this on Dec. 17. Imagine you could see all those things above today. We have very few patrons today. One could just about triangulate to figure out who checked out which books. I don't want to ask a librarian what I think is a dumb question and then see it broadcast on the web. Still... Any libraries doing anything like this?


Posted by BOYER, JOSH | Dec 17 2008, 03:59:08 PM EST | Permalink |


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