Free book usage data

Tony Hirst pointed me to this intriguing post.

I'm very proud to announce that Library Services at the University of Huddersfield has just done something that would have perhaps been unthinkable a few years ago: we've just released a major portion of our book circulation and recommendation data under an Open Data Commons/CC0 licence. In total, there's data for over 80,000 titles derived from a pool of just under 3 million circulation transactions spanning a 13 year period.

http://library.hud.ac.uk/usagedata/

I would like to lay down a challenge to every other library in the world to consider doing the same.

This isn't about breaching borrower/patron privacy — the data we've released is thoroughly aggregated and anonymised. This is about sharing potentially useful data to a much wider community and attaching as few strings as possible.

I'm guessing some of you are thinking: "what use is the data to me?". Well, possibly of very little use — it's just a droplet in the ocean of library transactions and it's only data from one medium-sized new University, somewhere in the north of England. However, if just a small number of other libraries were to release their data as well, we'd be able to begin seeing the wider trends in borrowing.