There were also suggestions to put such information on this page as movies coming soon, new dvd/bd releases, loaned movies with overdue, people who have birthday or died today etc.
Those sound like RSS feeds, so in that regard I assume this would be a completely user-configurable thing (i.e., simply specify the feed and number of items to show).
For database queries (like the items buah suggests), it would be nice if they could be specified with the long-awaited and much-anticipated
Saved Search feature. This would be another reason for implementing some sort of saved search management facility that's not available
only from
Advanced Search. It would be used to place a saved search on the Home Page, as well as attaching them to menus and/or toolbar buttons. This would be an excellent way to "show off" the power and flexibility of
Advanced Search. Each such item on the Home Page could be linked to the actual search so it would be easy to modify and re-save them, or just use any one of them as a starting point for a new search.
Another not-yet-existing feature that would work well with this is would be the ability to generate summary statistics (number of records, average or median for any numeric field, top 10 number of occurrences of a value for any field, etc.) for any search.