Tag Archives: Safari Books

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Ellen Kaufman, Stephen Francoeur, Harold Gee, Joseph Hartnett, Ryan Phillips, Mike Waldman

ARC and ALEPH
We discussed the challenges that the CUNY Office of Library Services is facing as it tries to set up ARC (Aleph 500 Reporting Center), which is a product from Ex Libris that allows Aleph 500 customers to generate sophisticated reports on the items in the catalog and their use.

Capturing User Experience
Ryan discussed capturing user experiences, some ideas and tools presented by Michael Lascarides as part of the NYPL Service Excellence symposium in September. Michael Lascarides is a User Analyst with the Digital Experience Group at NYPL. His presentation was titled  “Uncovering Stories”. Two takeaways from his presentation discussed were how to capture user experiences and how users react to bad design and bad user experiences. One tool he mentioned for capturing users’ online experiences is Google Analytics, a tool for analyzing web site traffic. (If you are reading this blog post on the web, then you can view the slides from Lascarides’ presentation below.)

SFX Page with Links to Google Books
We discussed the draft of the SFX FIND IT page that offers Google Books as a target when the item presented is a book that happens to be fully or partially available in Google Books. We also discussed the problems we had a few years ago with a trial to Safari Books.

SFX and bX
We also discussed the Ex Libris bX Recommender, which would function similarly to the Amazon recommendation feature (i.e., “You might also like…”). This tool, highlighted in Eric’s recent email about SFX options, presents article suggestions when you click the SFX Find It link next to an item in your search results. Stephen mentioned that Dave Pattern of University of Huddersfield gave a presentation at Internet Librarian International on how he uses transaction data from his catalog for “you might like” feature in his catalog. (If you are reading this blog post on the web, you can view the slides below; otherwise, you can find them online at Slideshare.)