Having spent a lot of time this week thinking about the issues in my privacy and social networks post, I don’t want to head home this weekend w/o a brief followup, which comes from an exchange I had with our manager of integrated systems (aka OPAC Wrangler). David pointed out a couple of gaps in my thinking: first, that offering suggestions based on aggregate circulation data probably won’t work very well because items simply don’t circulate that much! At Amazon, a single title can be purchased by lots of people, but in an academic library, a single title, even a very popular one, is only going to circulate a few times per semester, at most. He also points out that circulation data would miss the large usage of e-resources, though with the right statistical software maybe that could still be factored in.
The big fish-slap to the face though was when he reminded me that regardless of what the “kids” want, we still serve a very diverse population, and the average age of the professoriate is slightly higher than the 13-25 age range I was discussing. If we went all 3.0 and offered all sorts of cool services, including recommendation services, we’d probably have to have an opt in/out opportunity, which while doable, would make the whole endeavor a little more difficult.
I feel like Icarus – it’s neat to fly, but I don’t want to get too high 😉
Technorati Tags: demographics, libraries