BiblioCommons wireframe walk-through

After the Future of the ILS Symposium wrapped up, Beth Jefferson walked some of us through the current state of the BiblioCommons mocked-up Web UI for public library catalogs; the project grew out of a youth literacy project designed to encourage kids to read through the same sort of social networking and recommendation mechanisms as employed by Amazon, NetFlix, etc.

• Users spend an incredible amount of time in My Account (possibly skewed somewhat due to the Unicorn defaults) -- almost 50% of the page hits in the subject catalogs; therefore they make the account page the home page, rather than the PINES approach of a stripped-down Google-like search interface

• Default settings favour maximum privacy, but initial activities (e.g. adding a review) prompt the user to decide whether they want to share this information or not; very granular, dynamic scheme

• Avoid "top ten" item lists on front page because you're setting your patrons up for a disappointingly long hold time

• Home page is "recently returned items", which prompts users for reviews, tagging, discussions, "users waiting for this item might also like" recommendations; they're trying to build an electronic analogue of the physical return cart (which is what many patrons intuitively use as a recommendation service today

• Tagging is categorized (genre, personal, some other categories I forget)

  • You can subscribe to individual tags that another user has set (so if you only care about what somebody has tagged "mystery", you can avoid getting recommendations for what they tagged "earth science"
  • Unlike most social networking sites, a targeted user has no option to prevent you from adding them as a friend; they can, however, prevent you from sending them an instant message

• User avatars consist of username + font customizations; icon avatars presented too much visual conflict with book covers

• List of books on hold provides alternate recommendations per book

• Technically, the project is being built on top of Unicorn -- catalog data and circ status is dumped on a nightly basis, live circ status is retrieved via NCIP only when an individual item record is displayed

• If a given item is not available at a branch, display says "Available in 2-4 weeks" (or whatever) rather than saying "request by interlibrary loan" -- maybe not so applicable to the OPAC in single-site libraries, but a possible enhancement for a link resolver: "Get it @ XYZ Library" is exactly what students are trying to do in the overall research process, so instead tell them whether something is "available via full text download", "available in print in the XYZ Library", or "available in 1-2 weeks" (for something that will require ILL)

• Bibliocommons hope to make the module an interface that can provide different wrappers for underlying library systems

• Beth offered to provide a webcast walk-through of the UI for a broader audience -- stay tuned