Scott Ziegler
Scott Ziegler is the Head of Technology at the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia, PA. He spends about half his time administering digital humanities projects, and the other half of his time thinking up new tools to promote the collections in his library. He has a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy from Louisiana State University, and a Masters of Science degree in Library and Information Science from Drexel University.
Book recommendation systems are increasingly common, from Amazon to public library interfaces. However, in the land of archives and special collections, such automated assistance has been rare. This is partly due to the the complexity of descriptions — EADs describing whole collections — and partly due to the complexity of the collections themselves — what is this collection “about”, and how is it related to another collection?
The American Philosophical Society Library is experimenting with the use of circulation data, collected through the Aeon request system, to automate recommendations. In our prototype, which we’re calling PAL (People Also Liked), recommendations are offered in two ways: based on interests (“You’re interested in X, other people interested in X looked at these collections”) and on specific requests (“You’ve looked at Y, other people who looked at Y also looked that these collections”).
In this lightning round, I will briefly discuss the development of this system, as well as ongoing challenges. We consider our prototype to be advanced beta. We’re using it in-house to collect feedback and suggestions. We hope to work with other libraries to generalize the code base and promote the automation of recommendations.