Weekly News Digest

Medialab, creator of the library search and discovery platform AquaBrowser (www.aquabrowser.com), announced the general release of My Discoveries with functionality for users to create reviews and ratings and view personal tags. These features boost the existing AquaBrowser social networking experience and are designed to create a true global community for library users. AquaBrowser is an ILS vendor-neutral, visual faceted search that connects to any number and type of data sources.

My Discoveries was introduced in 2007 and initially allowed users to tag items, search and refine on user tags, plus create, share, and search on user lists. My Discoveries with LibraryThing content has been seeding library catalogs with 21 million tags created by users of LibraryThing.com. Now with the latest release of My Discoveries, users can review and rate items and view personal tag clouds. The user interface was also enhanced to be more intuitive based on patron comments and customer feedback.

Ratings are easily created using the star system employed at other popular sites. Individuals see not only the rating they’ve attached to an item but the averaged global community rating based on all user input across all My Discoveries libraries worldwide. And the user functionality to create tags, lists, reviews, and ratings is now accessible at both the results list and title level.

Blacklisting support for tags has been expanded and is also available for reviews. Although libraries are embracing Library 2.0 technology, there is still a desire to monitor language that appears in the library’s website and catalog. Library staff members may also monitor their statistics for how many tags, lists, ratings, and reviews are being created in their local system as well as globally.

Medialab Solutions BV is dba AquaBrowser North America in the U.S. and is a business unit of R. R. Bowker (www.bowker.com).

Source: Medialab