Recently Checked Out Books feed (in RSS or otherwise)

One of the things it would be lovely to have and to explore from a library is a feed of the books that have recently been checked out or that have recently been returned. You have all found out about new books by looking at the returns cart - it would be great to make that info visible digitally. Make the feed available by some open API - RSS, at least, and something more if you have it - so that patrons like me can sift through it in ways you haven't figured out yet. And keep patron individual information private, please.

I am told, though I have not been there, that the Seattle Public Library is already doing this, in the form of data-driven artwork called "Making Visible the Invisible". People are "mesmerized" when they see it. Done right, they should be able to see something similar at home.

zen.cat notes in chat (add superpatronbot@gmail.com to your chat client) that it would be extra cool if the Library of Congress had 50 monitors up on 50 libraries, one from each state, around the country, all showing a slide show of what people were reading there. "walt whitman would have loved something like that".

Comments

[eli]

Hm, this one would be a snap. We've found a flatfile on our system that basically logs every transaction in real time, inlcluding checkouts, checkins, and holds. It would be easy to publish a feed of titles having recent activity...

John, make it so. =)

[Dave Pattern]

Nice idea Ed - I might have to stea... ahem, borrow it

;-)

We've got a lovely big plasma screen in our library entrance that would be ideal for displaying this kind of thing... in fact (thought occuring whilst I type this!), why not have a collage of the most recently checked out book covers? Maybe this has already been done somewhere else?

Nuts - now you've made me want to start coding!!!

[Dave Pattern]

...and now I've finished coding - I think this might be my quickest hack ever :-D

Here's the 10 most recent CKO covers:

http://webcat.hud.ac.uk:4128/perl/recentckos.pl

It's 9:30pm in the UK, so we might not be getting many checkouts but the main library will be open for another 2 and half hours (self service only tho!)

[Edward Vielmetti]

Wow, that was fast.

10 is good, but I think you have room to fill up a whole browser screen with cover images. And it would I hope not be too hard I hope to make it so that you could click on a cover image and go to the catalog record.

[Dave Pattern]

Okay - here we go:

30 randomly placed covers with links to the OPAC

...and...

Word Splat!

Word Splat! is made up of words form the titles of the most recent X number of check outs.

I made a typo when initially coding the Word Splat!, and ended up with a random sub selection of words at the top left. I kinda like that, so whatever you get at the top left (if anything) is officially the title of that Splat!

:-D

[Alexandre Rafalovitch]

Great idea.

How about convincing the LibraryElf creator to aggregate this from the website's data. After all, it checks all the accounts daily, so can trace in and outs.

This obviously would only be data from subscribers, but it might be a good cross-library start. And does not require any more data scraping that is there already.

Alex.