JISC RSC YH Exchange News

Could you help librarians decide which books to buy? Programmers interested in library data are invited to take part in a JISC project competition to find the best possible application of user activity information.

The Mosaic, or ‘Making Our Shared Activity Information Count’, project aims to show how collectible library user data is, what uses there may be for it, and the benefits of collecting it on a national or large scale.

They are therefore launching this competition to invite entrants to produce a browser based application that makes use of some or all of the Mosaic project’s library activity data, which covers hundreds of thousands of records over four years at the University of Huddersfield library.

The data includes the names of the books borrowed, and the course and year of study of the borrowers, so there is plenty of scope for programmers to imagine how this information might be used to improve the library service and the user experience.

David Kay, principal consultant at project organisers Sero, says: “We want entrants to imagine what they would do with this data if they were a librarian or a library user. We are looking for entries that genuinely improve libraries for their users, which in some way unearth the hidden value of this data, for example, by helping librarians decide which books to buy or helping students make choices from a reading list.”

Entries will be judged on broad criteria to encourage innovative and wide-ranging thinking: ease of use, usefulness, potential and ‘coolness’. The winner will receive a £1000 prize.

The data that the entrants will use represents part of the information gathered by Mosaic from higher education libraries in the UK.

David added: “We’ve started with books because of the historical data that we have – but our ambition is that in the future this library information will include data from digital resources, such as the number of times a journal article or presentation has been downloaded.”

The URL for entries must be received by email at info@sero.co.uk by the closing date of 23:59 hours on Monday 14 September 2009.

For more information about the competition, visit the Mosaic website:
http://www.sero.co.uk/jisc-mosaic-competition.html

Check out the ideas generated around this and other library data at the July 2009 Mashed Library event: http://mashlib09.wordpress.com/

Explore a list of useful resources compiled for a previous competition at:
http://www.talis.com/tdn/competition_sources

Find out more about the objectives of the MOSAIC project:
http://www.sero.co.uk/jisc-mosaic.html