Building a Better Book Widget: Using Alma Analytics to Automate New Book Discovery

Creator(s)

Travis Clamon, East Tennessee State UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-6-2019

Description

Are we doing enough to market newly acquired book titles? Libraries purchase and subscribe to many new book titles each year, both print and electronic. However, we rely on the expectation that users will periodically search our systems to discover newly acquired titles. Static lists and displays have been traditional marketing methods for libraries, but require tedious time and effort to maintain. Without a practical solution for an academic library, East Tennessee State University developed an automated process to generate book widgets utilizing data from Alma Analytics. These widgets are now deployed in our subject guides, website, and on our digital displays. This article outlines the development and implementation of these widgets. We also discuss the challenges we encountered, such as finding image covers and custom subject tagging.

Copyright Statement

© Travis Clamon. This document was originally published in code4Lib Journal.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Citation Information

Clamon, Travis. 2019. Building a Better Book Widget: Using Alma Analytics to Automate New Book Discovery. Code4Lib Journal. (44). https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/14371 ISSN: 1940-5758