Comments in the catalog

I'm still catching up on posting yesterday's sessions.

Glenn Peterson, Hennepin (MN) County Library did a session on "Comments in the Catalog: Community Interaction." You can see Hennepin County's catalog from its Web site at http://www.hclib.org/ (I love this Web site!) His presentation will be posted at www.hclib.org/extranet.

He described the comments as Mini-reviews or "a blog for every book."

All posted comments are listed with the title in the library catalog.

The seeds of this idea were first planted when the library started to encourage teens and kids to read in summer by posting book reviews on Web site. The kids liked it, and the library decided to let it run through the school year as well.

The library later moved on to adults, but it wasn't as successful. It was heartening to hear this since I know some SEMLS members have struggled with getting patrons to participate when their libraries have started blogging. It really seems like the younger patrons are the audience to start with on these projects.

When Hennepin County's IT people started to talk about customizing the catalog using APIs, the idea was raised to include conversations about books.

He demoed adding a comment to a title, and it was as easy as commenting on this blog. In the bib record, the Comments button is in the upper right section of the bib record, taking up pretty prominent real estate. After adding a comment, users are prompted to log in with user name so that comments are tracked by user.

Patrons can comment from the bib screen and from their "Items Out" screen. Also can comment from book lists on the site. Showed example. Very nice booklists. Incorporates book cover and summary.

This feature is essentially a mash-up combining many different data sources:

• Bib info – catalog
• Enriched content – Syndetics (could get this content from Amazon as well.)
• Patron comments
• Audio reviews from staff (podcasts) included on comments page and booklist page as well.
• Amazon reviews – need to click to see them, but they display on the page. It doesn't go to Amazon, but you need to include a link back to Amazon.

Most of titles don't have comments on this point, so you can click over to Amazon titles. It was a mildly controversial decision.

The library provides an RSS feed for comments on a particular title or you can subscribe to a feed for all comments.

The comments are the most-heavily used feature on the site. It's big with teens. 5700 comments from 3000 users over the first 11 months.

There are not as many people leaving comments as looking for comments.

They have also noticed The Long Tail effect with this comment feature. (If you are not familiar with the Long Tail, you can read it at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. There are a small number of titles with multiple comments and a lot of titles with just one or two comments. The new Harry Potter book, in the catalog as an On Order record, is already getting comments about the title.

Comments are pre-screened for language, what he called a "naughty word filter." Ver few comments are problematic "almost none." It's an automated process. Peterson noted there are a lot of places on the Web where people can comment. Why come to the library to leave nasty comments? Title is the word that gets flagged the most, just because the first three letters raise a red flag.

The automated process batches comments from the last four hours and send them as an e-mail message to the Web Services staff. They can just click a link to hide a comment. They can mask words as well.

To-do list:

Ratings – surprised how many critical comments they receive. He thought people would only take the time if they really liked it.

Avatars (Great idea! teens love the avatars on My Own Cafe and want us to make them even bigger.)

User profiles - another great idea for the teens. Users on My Own Cafe love to really personalize their presence on the site.

Tag clouds – now that they have enough comments, they would like to do a tag cloud of the most frequent words in titles and comments (e.g. romantic, scary).

Related developments – WPopac, now called Scriblio, includes comments (There will be a presentation on Scriblio at NELA this fall.) SOPAC (social OPAC) at Ann Arbor District Library. Millennium III now has a tab for reviews, but he's not sure how it works.

LibraryThing for Libraries. Service for libraries that will utilize that social information and apply it to the library catalogs.

I love what Hennepin County has done with its catalog, but it also is a little frustrating to see it because I know most, if not all, of our libraries do not have the technical skills, staff time, money, etc to customize their catalog with using APIs. It's a shame that our vendors cannot use these grass-roots efforts as a model for incorporating similar features into catalogs so that libraries did not have to do all this works to provide a forum for their patrons.