B...B...B...Bibliocommons!

Bibliocommons... So far my experience with the "new catalog" has been great! During our test run I ran into a few questions that I was able to e-mail to Pat. Here they are with her response:

1. If I rate materials will the system generate a list of recommendations for me? Is this based on other user ratings?

You get recommendations from other users you choose to “follow”. If you look at other users’ comments and collections and find someone who’s taste agrees with yours, you can follow them. After that, whenever they rate something with 4 or 5 stars, it will appear in your list of recommendations. This is sort of a one-way street. You can follow them but they don’t know it. When you choose to follow someone, you can limit what kinds of recommendations you want to get from them--everything or different categories based on what’s already in their collection.

2. What happens to a bibliocommons account if a patron loses their library card and needs to get a new number?

Good question. It automatically re-links to the new card no.

3. Is there a way to sync bibliocommons with other book networking sites, like Visual Bookshelf or Shelfari?

Not right now. I understand they have future plans to include the ability to import collections (and lists?) created on other sites.

4. Is there a way to make an entire account private?

Not exactly. The only parts that are ever not private are lists, comments and collections. However, there is the ability to make lists or items in lists and collections or items in collections private. You can make them private individually or all at once.

5. I also ran into an error... I was searching for some children's books and on two occasions the catalog said there was a copy available, but when I looked under availabilty details all copies where marked checked out.

The Find it at DBRL sidebar does not show real time availability info. I talked to the programmer at Bibliocommons this morning and they are not updating it but every 3 hours. I told him we really want it to be more current--we do a high volume and it helps to have that as correct as possible. He’s going to gradually decrease the amount of time between syncs and monitor the system for any negative effects. In the meantime--the availability details are the ones you can take to the bank.

Some of these may be antiquated by now, but I thought I would share them nonetheless... just in case anyone else came across similar questions.