Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

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!

By Ted

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