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Well!! Did I just give a good product idea?? """A recommendation engine for use in libraries to learn from reading habits of students(borrowers)and hence suggest next reads.""" Not sure how much money can it make though. :-)

Edit: Online book/movie selling/renting engines do that, but not sure of real world libraries doing that. Especially now , when the books are going "e". :-)

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Yeah, there's already plenty of libraries and library-vendors that offer recommendations (Librarything, OCLC's Navigator). Even some open-source online library catalogs have rudimentary recommendations based on subject categories. Libraries likely don't offer recommendations based on a user's checkout history because of a long tradition of utmost privacy concerning a patron's information.

As a librarian though, I'm much more interested in tracking and understanding uses of scholarly journal articles. Most research in academic libraries occurs online, and the current vendors do little but index and provide a search engine.

Good point: """Libraries likely don't offer recommendations based on a user's checkout history because of a long tradition of utmost privacy concerning a patron's information."""

That's where privacy statements like these come in:

http://www.goodreads.com/about/privacy [courtesy j2d2]

Check out goodreads.com.

thanks for sharing the link.

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