The Singapore National Library Board (NLB) – with 25 public libraries, over 1.5 million titles and more than 30 million loans per year – offers an excellent opportunity to build a business case for Big Data Analytics (BDA). And they did just that.
Relying on vendors and building up its internal capability in unison, the NLB is currently executing some ROI-generating projects that ooze Big Data appeal:
- Superior search results – data mining past loan record patterns and performing text analytics on them as well as books’ bibliographies to generate enhanced search results and recommendations
- Demand Analysis – forecasting the demand for new and existing titles
- Planning a library’s collection – optimization technology used to plan each library’s category mix, maximizing the number of loans given space and budget constraints
All these Big Data Analytics are done using a Hadoop cluster with 13 virtual servers on 3 virtual machine hosts. Elegant!