The power of Suggestion, courtesy of AJAX

Dave Pattern at the University of Huddersfield continues to innovate on top of his Horizon OPAC. His latest enhancement leverages the capabilities of 'AJAX' to suggest other books that his staff and students might like to read. Find out more about AJAX and what Dave has done, and share your own experiences with AJAX.

AJAX - Asynchronous Javascript and XML - is a term used to describe the orchestration of a number of simple Web standards to enable a far more dynamic browsing experience.

Google Maps and Talis' Whisper demonstrator are two examples of AJAX-rich web applications, where the user perceives a far more interactive engagement than they might be used to via the web browser. Google Maps, for example, allows the user to pan across the map seamlessly, rather than having to click in the direction they wish the map to move and then wait for new map data to download from the server.

Dave Pattern at the University of Huddersfield has done much to extend the capabilities of the SirsiDynix Horizon OPAC installed at his institution, and he frequently shares examples of this work on his blog.

In this most recent example, Dave leverages AJAX to offer suggestions of other items that might be relevant, based upon borrower data within the institution and his 'pewbot' web service.

It's an interesting example of what's possible, although I've always suspected that an individual institution doesn't have enough traffic for the data to average out sufficiently for the recommendations to make much sense. Doing the same thing with aggregated data would be interesting, though, and possibly even more useful than Amazon's equivalent.

What do you think about extending the OPAC in this way? What have you done, or what might you like to see done by others?

To learn more about AJAX, why not read Jesse James Garrett's seminal paper, or check out our book reviews area?