Looking at some figures...
The new Talis Source website will be available shortly, and I'd like to draw everyone's attention to the section on Analytics.
Firstly, I should say that this is just the start. We're hoping to increase the amount of facts and figures we have on here over the coming months. But what we have so far makes pretty interesting reading. Well, it does to me, as I have always suffered from a fascination with not just analysing stats, but in their generation.
Here's a graph denoting the growth in holdings from 2005/06
Levels of holdings data were largely unchanged throughout 2005, levelling off at around 41 million holdings. In 2006, we experienced levels of contribution started to rise as Talis took over responsibility for data contribution. In April 2006, we undertook an extensive data cleaning exercise, before loading a substantial sum of new records which have actually took us past the 42 million mark in the middle of May.
The Live Services team are doing a great job, but an even better one is being done by all those libraries that are starting to understand what it means to contribute to the Talis Platform, a free means to discover and share their holdings with other like-minded institutions. Initially, for many of you participating, you're going to be using Talis Source to view these holdings. But, moving forward, we should start to see these holdings appearing in all sorts of places as developers start to use our web services to expose these where either you are interacting or your users. For those at the road shows, you may have seen the Amazon plug-in we are testing, which basically puts a small list unobtrusively within the Amazon pages where you can see libraries holding the book that someone is considering buying. We should also start to see, following our recent research day with many other LMS vendors, these holdings starting to be integrated directly into your LMS. Why? Well, that's what you've been asking for. You don't want to be moving from one application to search, to another to request - it should be a seamless workflow. Hopefully, we'll start seeing more of this starting to happen in the future...
Anyhow, stats! I'm interested to find out from you what you'd like to see shown on this page. If its possible, I'll look into generating it. So, give it some thought and post any ideas directly to me or as comments below.