glasgow: opac 2.0 and beyond

OPAC 2.0 and Beyond!…to boldly go where no library has gone before

Dave Pattern

Library Systems Manager

University of Huddersfield, UK

d.c.pattern@hud.ac.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?

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