JIBS, London

Making the catalogue a good place to be lipstick, cowbells and serendipity Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager University of Huddersfield [email_address] http://slideshare.net/daveyp

Contents
does your OPAC suck?
OPAC survey findings
experiences at Huddersfield
other libraries
OPAC 2.0
further OPAC survey findings
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Does Your OPAC “Suck”?

“More Cowbell” …huh? “ Used to express that something is deeply lacking oomph... to express that something is far from perfect, needs repair, fixing, rectifying.” ( everything2.com )

The OPAC as a Pig
“After all, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still very much a pig.” (Roy Tennant discussing the OPAC, Library Journal , 2005)
“Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.” (attrib. Robert Heinlein, author)

Pig Ugly?

“ Kissy, Kissy?”

OPAC Survey (2007)
On a scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is extremely unhappy and 10 is extremely happy), how happy are you with your OPAC?
5.1


OPAC Survey (2007)
One criticism of OPACs is that they rarely have cutting edge features that our users expect from a modern web site.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you think your OPAC meets the needs and expectations of your users?
4.5

OPAC Survey (2007)
On a scale of 1 to 10, how easy do you think one of your average users finds your OPAC is to use?
4.6
On a scale of 1 to 10, how important do you think it is that an OPAC is easy & intuitive to use?
9.2

Experiences at Huddersfield
definitely not OPAC 2.0
enhancements to the existing OPAC
user suggestions from surveys
“ 2.0” inspired features
borrowing good ideas from other web sites
new features launched with no/low publicity
“ perpetual beta”
required staff buy-in and a willingness to experiment and take risks

Spell Checker
we monitored keyword searches over a six month period and discovered approx 23% of searches gave zero results
most OPACs present the user with a “dead end” page
a good search engine should still give the user options on a failed search (“did you mean?”)

Spell Checker

Keyword Suggestions
failed keyword searches are cross referenced with www.answers.com to provide new search suggestions

Keyword Suggestions

Borrowing Suggestions
we had details of over 2,000,000 CKOs spanning 10 years stored in the library management system and gathering virtual dust
Web 2.0 – “ Data is the Next Intel Inside 1 ”
historic circulation data can be mined 2 to uncover the hidden trends and links between potentially disparate library items

Borrowing Suggestions

Ratings and Comments

Other Editions
uses FRBR-y web services provided by OCLC and LibraryThing to locate other editions and related works within local holdings
OCLC’s xISBN 1
LibraryThing’s thingISBN 2

Other Editions

Email Alerts

RSS feeds

“If you build it, will they come?”

Increase in Usage

Lipstick on the Pig
“ 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 Tennant, Library Journal , 2005)

Problems ...Challenges!
there was no formal process for discussing and agreeing new OPAC features
so we organised a web/library 2.0 afternoon for staff
some initial scepticism from staff
would users think borrowing suggestions were formal recommendations from the library?
aren’t borrowing suggestions just for selling books?
how relevant will the suggestions be?
would sudden changes confuse users?

Solutions
encourage suggestions from staff
include users in decision making process
encourage play and experimentation
don’t be afraid to make mistakes!
look widely for ideas
“build crappy prototypes fast”
monitor usage
if usage is poor then remove it

Playing and experimenting

Searching for books by colour

Search visualisations

CKO visualisations

New! Keyword cloud (prototype)

New! Keyword cloud (live OPAC)

Other Libraries
Ann Arbor District Library
North Carolina State University (Endeca)
LibraryThing for Libraries
Open Source OPACs

Ann Arbor District Library
early adopter of “2.0” (John Blyberg)
OPAC deeply embedded in Library portal
virtual catalogue cards (with graffiti!)
user tagging, ratings, and reviews
borrowing suggestions
RSS feeds
http:// www.aadl.org/catalog /

North Carolina State University
facetted browsing
http:// www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog /
http:// endeca.com

LibraryThing for Libraries
integrates LibraryThing data into the OPAC
tags
borrowing suggestions
other editions
www.librarything.com/forlibraries /

Open Source OPACs
Scriblio (formerly WPOpac)
uses WordPress (blogging software)
VuFind
uses PHP & MySQL
Lucene & Solr
Project Backlight (Univ. of Virginia)
FacBackOPAC
Huddersfield ( blog post )

The Traditional Vendors
Talis Platform
“an environment for building next generation applications and services”
Ex Libris Primo
“one-stop solution for the discovery and delivery of local and remote resources”
Innovative Interfaces Encore
“goes beyond the online-catalog model to provide a better patron experience ”

OPAC 2.0
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
(Alan Kay, computer scientist and former Xerox PARC researcher)
“The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.”
(William Gibson, science fiction author and creator of the word “cyberspace”)

OPAC 2.0
shopping list of features:
spell checking (“did you mean?”)
relevancy ranking, search refining, and facets
manual recommendations (“best bets”)
automated suggestions (based on both global and user-specific data)
user participation (“read-write OPAC”)
foster communities of interest

OPAC 2.0
shopping list of features:
improve serendipity
expose hidden links between items
APIs and Web Services to expose data
promote unintended uses
user personalisation
embed external data (e.g. Wikipedia, LibraryThing)
RSS feeds and OpenSearch

Quick OPAC Survey – Features
Please rate how important you feel the following features are to your users in a modern OPAC.
embedding the OPAC in external sites (e.g. portals) 8.7
“ did you mean” spelling suggestions 8.6
enriched content (book covers, ToCs, etc) 8.4
RSS feeds (e.g. new books, searches, etc) 7.8
facetted browsing (e.g. like NCSU Library) 7.4
“ people who borrowed this” suggestions 6.5
user tagging of items (i.e. folksonomy) 6.1
user added comments and reviews 6.0
personalised suggestions (e.g. like Amazon) 5.9
user added ratings for items 5.7

Implementation of Features

Features – Future Trends?

Importance (getting soon)

Technology Adoption Lifecycle

Technology Adoption - Now

Technology Adoption – Q1 08?

Importance – UK respondents

Thank you!

JIBS, London

by daveyp on Nov 21, 2007

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