John Blyberg, of the Ann Arbor District Library, recently announced the release of the SOPAC. The SOPAC, “cute speak” for the Social OPAC, is a redevelopment of the library catalogue that contains a number of features that are present in the ever increasing sphere of Web 2.0 sites. Features include the ability to rate, review, comment-on, and tag items.
The interesting thing for me will be to see if users, who are using these types of features in other Web 2.0 sites, will use them in the context of a library catalogue. I certainly hope they do. It will be interesting to see.
Being a systems person in a Library I can empathise with John when he points out that “…the nature of our systems do not yield readily to this kind of retrofitting…”. I look forward to further posts from John on this topic. It is a concern I had earlier when I posted about the Evergreen system here on LINT.
The issue, as I see it, is that up until fairly recently we, meaning the library community, haven’t been asking our vendors for features that would readily allow extensions of our systems in this way. We’ve asked vendors for a complete Integrated Library Management System. Where the same vendor provided all components of the system.
The key word here is integrated. We asked for one system that could do it all, from cataloguing to acquisitions and to the OPAC. This, I believe, has lead to monolithic systems that do not interoperate very well. The focus for us, and therefore the vendor, has been inward. Ensuring that the components of the ILMS integrated with each other.
I think we’re now starting to look ahead and see a future were want to be able to do many different things with our systems. To do that we need systems that interoperate well. The focus needs to shift, and I think it is starting to do so, away from looking inward to looking outward. We are now looking for systems that are not only integrated we now need them to be interoperable.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of the SOPAC and if other people will be able to implement it in there own institutions. Fortunately John has released the source code, which is very generous of him, and I look forward to hearing more about SOPAC in the future.
First spotted on LibrarianInBlack.
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January 24, 2007 at 17:45
I’m so jealous. I barely have time to worry about service packs let alone explore retrofitting dinosaurs with web2.0 gowns.
January 26, 2007 at 03:10
Perhaps as important as the AADL’s creation of an OPAC with social features is the product they based it on– Drupal, the open source content management system. OPACs are (now, anyway) part of a category of products and libraries can finally break out of the little world of library automation and benefit from the creativity and pricing advantages of the broader technology world.