Roy Tennant, California Digital Library & Tim Spalding, LibraryThing
Tim: The Fun Opac
Tim: The Fun Opac
- OPACs should have funability
- “The library is the most fun you can have with your pants on”
- Bring the OPAC front and center, don’t separate it from the Web site
- Separate because we’re ashamed of the OPAC
- Inbound links don’t go to records but to the homepage or a timeout screen
- Link outwards & people will come to you
- Why not link to commercial services? Your patrons are already aware of them.
- No benefit from being a Mall
- Link around, make everything clickable
- “massive linking”
- Dress up your OPAC
- covers
- Syndetics
- Amazon.com
- Free open repository of covers needs to be created
- link to Wikipedia via ISBNs
- Put your data out there
- you’re not the only one who knows how to work with your data
- librarians don’t have a monopoly on fun
- Feeds
- of new books
- from a search
- subject headings
- People don’t want your content, they want their content
- Blog widgets
- They want to tell people what they’re reading
- LibraryThing widget
- What I’m reading now v. random
- Random way more popular
- How much money do I owe my library?
- Library Thing Tage Consortium
Roy: Catalogs for the Future
- Refuse to use the “O word”
- what future?
- Demise of the catalog at the local level
- ILS still needed
- New world order
- discovery disaggregated form the ILS
- OpwnWorldCat
- Metasearch
- Others
- [diagram slide about worldcat, openworldcat & worldcat local]
- Why this makes sense
- users typically want to fine everything they can on a topic
- prefer to search in one place if possible
- most ILSs lack cool new features
- WorldCat Identities
- FictionFinder
- Needle Library, Hystack College
- made up example
- finding tool, not an OPAC
- Next Gen ILS
- refocused on library operations
- discrete components that interoperate through rapid protocols
- able to work well with other systems
- Upload to other systems
- expose APIs
- inexpensive, scaleable, & easy maintenance
- [Pines Evergreen System]
- Next Gen Finding Tools
- integrate access to wide variety of sources
- Able to use info from other systems as well as provide it (via protocols)
- offer sophisticated features
- relevance
- faceted browsing
- not a library catalog
