Automated Readers Advisory - Taxonomy or Node Reference

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mikeybusiness's picture

I was wondering if anyone had any experience building something for automating readers advisory. My librarians are calling it "read-a-likes." The idea is that there is a list of authors. Each author would link to their page with links to other similar authors. You can see the example below.

If you like David Baldacci, then try:

William Bernhardt
Stephen J. Cannell
Linda Fairstein
Vince Flynn
James Grippando
John Grisham
Brad Meltzer
Kyle Mills
Robert Tanenbaum
Stuart Woods (Will Lee Series)

A further example can be found here.
http://www.lansing.lib.il.us/readalikeauthors.html

My first thought is that It would be easy to do with taxonomy and free tagging, however I've done similar things with node reference. I guess the real question is what would work best when I build the view? It seems logical to build one large page that can be filtered by the user. I'll be using Drupal 5. That limits me to Views 1.x. I haven't totally wrapped my head around it so I'm open to ideas.

Comments

Move to Drupal 6?

highermath's picture

Almost anything can be done, if you are willing to get your hands dirty coding modules, but even if you are, you have to ask yourself if that effort wouldn't be better spent doing whatever it takes to move to Drupal 6, which gives you access to Views 2, QViews and many other improvements. Also, bear in mind that full support for Drupal 5 will end when Drupal 7 is released.

It really depends on how you

liberatr's picture

It really depends on how you want to relate the authors. A nodereference would draw an explicit relationship between 2 authors, but taxonomy terms could be used to draw implicit relationships. At the same time, I don't know a great way to actually generate the data there. How can we relate two horror authors without relating ALL horror authors? You'd have to have lots of niche tags.

Based on the example you pointed to, I'd use a nodereference.

EDIT: then I saw the second half of your example:

If you like "Financial Intrigue". This would imply tagging an author (and possibly a book) with that specific category, and then listing anything tagged as such. You've actually got both examples listed on the same page.

Another way would be to make another node type called "Financial Intrigue", and then you'd be able to say: "If you liked David Aaron, you might also like P.O. Bronson, Paul Erdman, or Financial Intrigue"

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