SALT – Surfacing the Academic Long Tail
Taken from the SALT blog at the address above:
"SALT will test the hypothesis that Library circulation activity data can be used to support humanities research by surfacing underused ‘long tail’ library materials through search. We will investigate how issues of relevance and frequency of borrowing might shift within the particular use case of humanities research. An API onto ten years of circulation data from The John Rylands University Library (JRUL) at The University of Manchester will be made available to the HEFE community, and the project will pay specific attention to the sustainability of an API service as a national shared service for HE/FE that both supports users and drives institutional efficiencies (e.g. collections management)"
I suppose I interpret this as a more complex version of the catalogue functions that suggest alternative books if you search for another. I'd be interested to see it in practice and whether it could be made to run 'real tim' in the future.
