Hi all,
Today marks the first day of the new fiscal year for MassLNC, and our
development committee has identified a few new enhancements we are
hoping to sponsor over the next year.
We have received proposals from Equinox for all three projects, but
MassLNC needs help to fund these projects. I am sending out this
e-mail to see if there are other Evergreen sites interested in helping
us fund any of these projects. For more details, you can e-mail me
directly at kluss...@masslnc.org.
Also, if you are already working on a similar project or just want to
provide some feedback for our proposed projects, please feel to share
your feedback on the list.
These three projects are listed on the new Proposed Development
Projects wiki page at:
http://wiki.evergreen-ils.org/doku.php?id=evergreen_features:proposed_development_projects
ACTIVITY METRIC FOR RELEVANCE RANKING
The goal of this project is for a title's activity (circulations,
number of holds, etc.) to affect the relevance of that title when
retrieving search results. Google and Amazon use popularity with much
success when ranking search results. I think Evergreen would see
similar success if it were to incorporate activity into its relevance
algorithm.
As an example, if a user were conducting a keyword search on "abraham
lincoln," there are many books, movies, etc. in most US libraries
where the words "abraham lincoln" show up in the title. There would be
no way to tease out the titles that are getting the most attention by
readers. In fact, a title like "Team of Rivals" ranks very low in our
search results even though there is a fairly high likelihood it is the
title the patron is seeking. By applying a metric based on activity,
we might be able to see those more-recently popular titles floating
higher in the search results list.
The current proposal is to make factors like circulation and hold
activity, record and item age, and item ownership counts available as
an activity metric. Each factor will embody a "popularity badge" that
a bib record can earn, and each badge will have a five-point scale,
where more points indicate a more popular record.
The average of the badge points earned by each record will constitute
a "popularity star rating". The number and types of badges will break
ties for average popularity.
A new sort axis of popularity will be created to sort first on the
cumulative popularity of each record, followed by the query-specific
relevance available today.
ENHANCEMENTS TO EVERGREEN ALERTS
I mentioned this project in the recent thread on problems with items
not checking in properly - http://markmail.org/message/rnm5s7wdxjgy3tym.
This project would give Evergreen sites more control over which alerts
appear during check-in and check-out. The project has three components:
- Separate checkin and checkout copy alerts
- The ability to add temporary copy alerts from the checkin, checkout,
and item status screen
- A library setting that allows sites to determine if some system
alerts should appear at checkin and checkout.
MassLNC's full project requirements are available at
http://masslnc.cwmars.org/node/2764.
This project is not slated to begin until Fall 2014 after sprint 1 of
the web client project is complete.
MESSAGE CENTER FOR THE PUBLIC CATALOG
This project would create a message center that communicates important
messages to patrons. Public patron notes will display here, and sites
will have the ability to configure any action/trigger notice to also
deliver a notice to the message center.
MassLNC's full project requirements are available at
http://masslnc.cwmars.org/node/2927.
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions!
Kathy
