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OPAC 2.0 and Beyond!…to boldly go where no library has gone before
Dave Pattern
Library Systems Manager
University of Huddersfield, UK
www.daveyp.com/blog/
Preamble
• Presentation available at:– www.slideshare.net/daveyp/
• Please remix and reuse this presentation– creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0
• Have you remembered to switch your phone on?– please feel free to take photos, record audio, blog,
tweet (@daveyp), etc
Contents
• Before the OPAC
• OPAC 1.0
• OPAC 2.0
• Beyond the OPAC
Once upona time…
The following slides may contain library pornography…
Warning!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/emdot/535440373/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/domesticat/2111747772/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/underpuppy/4703228/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tryingyouth/2456237/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bfurlong/3190926784/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterlibrary/2981624987/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamthebestartist/2329267266/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelinlibrarian/851933622/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathansnider/442667205/
The 1980s…
http://www.college.library.wisc.edu/about/faq/history.shtml
The 1990s…
Library Hi Tech Journal, 2002
Library Hi Tech Journal, 2002
The 21st Century…
MARC21
• “Designed to redefine the original MARC record format for the 21st century…”
• …and yet, the primary purpose of the complex punctuation rules in MARC21 seems to be to ensure that you can still produce perfect printed catalogue cards!
Conspiracy theory #1
What we thinkour users
want…
Conspiracy Theory #2
• Why are we trying to turn our users into little mini librarians?
• “Thou shalt not use yonder library until thou hast understanding of...”– Dewey Classification– Shelfmarks & Shelf Order– Boolean Logic and Advanced Set Theory– the difference between accruing & outstanding fines
What our users want expect…
S. R. Ranganathan
Five laws of library science (1931)
4th Law: Save the time of the Reader• “…if readers find what they are
looking for in a timely mannerthey will be more satisfied, andmore likely to feel like theirneeds have been met.”
ENLITE Journal, circa 1969
With hindsight…
Where did it all go wrong?
• Just an online card catalogue?
• Just a stock inventory system?
• Poor search & refine functionality
<sarcasm> …but, aren’t librarians supposed to be experts on “search”? ;-)</sarcasm>
Roy TennantLibrary Journal, 2005
“I wish I had known that the solution for needing to teach our users how to search our catalog was to create a system that didn't need to be taught … I wish I had known that we would come to pay the price of our folly by seeing our users flock to commercial companies like Google and Amazon.”
Does your OPAC suck?
“The OPAC Sucks” song
The OPAC sucks, that's all I gotta sayYou're outta luck if you can't spell “Hemingway”...The OPAC sucks, a sad calamityLike it's stuck in 8 million B.C.The title that I seek
Is buried very deep
(lyrics by Brian Smith, Chicago Librarian)
Web 2.0
Ann Arbor District Library
Huddersfield
Background
• General unhappiness with vendor product• “In-house” enhancements to the existing
OPAC…– user suggestions from surveys– “Web 2.0” inspired features– borrowing good ideas from other web sites – new features launched with no/low publicity– “perpetual beta”
Keyword cloud
Guided keyword searches
Borrowing suggestions
Personalised suggestions
Email alerts
RSS feeds
Virtual shelf browser
Was it worth doing?
Borrowing profileaverage loans per month
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
average number of book loans per month
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
average number of clicks per month on “people who borrowed this” suggestions
Feature usage“people who borrowed this…”
40000
50000
60000
70000
80000
90000
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
number of unique titles (bib#) borrowed per calendar year (2009 figure is predicted)
The impact on borrowingrange of stock borrowed per year
borrowing suggestions added to catalogue at start of 2006
average number of books borrowed per active borrower per calendar year (2009 predicted)
The impact on borrowingaverage number of books borrowed
13
14
15
16
17
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Otherlibraries
North Carolina State University
Topeka and Shawnee County
University of Warwick
Hennepin County Library
“We need to focus more energy on important, systemic changes rather than cosmetic ones. If your system is more difficult to search and less effective than Amazon.com, then you have work to do.
After all, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still very much a pig.”
Roy TennantLibrary Journal, 2005
OPAC 2.0(“Next Gen”)
OPAC 2.0
• Second generation web OPACs
• Feature list…– relevancy ranking by default– faceted browsing / limiting– “did you mean?” spell checking– RSS feeds, OpenSearch, etc
• Marking MARC work harder!– importance of high quality, rich records
OPAC 2.0
• However, Web 2.0 seems only to have made a partial impact on OPAC 2.0…– tagging– ratings– reviews– social bookmarking
What’s missing from OPAC 2.0?
• We need more serendipity!– borrowing suggestions– “just in time” recommendations
• Social features– create links between borrowers
• Web services and APIs– encourage users to remix our data
Commerical products
• AquaBrowser
• Ex Libris: Primo
• Innovative Interfaces: Encore
• SirsiDynix: Enterprise
• Talis Platform: Prism 3
• DS: DSArena
Open Source OPACs
• Scriblio• VuFind• LibraryFind• fac-back-opac• Project Blacklight• The Social OPAC• Open Source LMS - Koha & Evergreen
Beyond the OPAC!
More than just books
• Single search for multiple silos:– library stock (books, journals, etc)
– electronic content (ebooks, ejournals, etc)
– digital repositories
– archive collections
– multimedia collections (audio, video, photos, etc)
• Many users are now format agnostic– ebooks, journals, podcasts, off-air TV recordings, YouTube
videos, blog posts, etc = information
Local indexes
• Traditional meta-searching too slow
• Local indexes = fast searches
• Serial Solutions: Summon– web content crawled and indexed in advance
• Some existing products also support local indexes…– Primo, VuFind, LibraryFind, etc
Summon
…and whither the OPAC?
• Let’s decouple the user front-end from the staff back-end!
• Will the “OPAC” return to just being an inventory of physical stock?– just one of many silos
• What goes around, comes around…– give it a few more years and we’ll probably go back to
using card catalogues! ;-)
Thank you!…any questions?
www.slideshare.net/daveyp/
www.daveyp.com/blog/
