The document discusses opportunities to improve the functionality and user experience of online public access catalogs (OPACs) through the adoption of Web 2.0 principles and features. It summarizes surveys that found users find existing OPACs difficult to use and lacking modern features. It then describes experiments at the University of Huddersfield to enhance their OPAC with spell checking, keyword suggestions, borrowing recommendations, and user reviews. The document advocates for an "OPAC 2.0" that better exposes library data through open web standards and embraces serendipity, user participation, and integration with external sources like Wikipedia.

1. OPAC 2.0: Teaching the Pig to Sing lipstick, cowbells and serendipity Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager University of Huddersfield [email_address] http://slideshare.net/daveyp

2. 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/

3. Does Your OPAC “Suck”?

7. “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 )

10. 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)

11. Pig Ugly?

12. “ Kissy, Kissy?”

13. 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 

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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?”)

18. Spell Checker

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

20. Keyword Suggestions

21. 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

22. Borrowing Suggestions

23. Ratings and Comments

24. 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

25. Other Editions

26. Email Alerts

27. RSS feeds

33. “If you build it, will they come?”

34. Increase in Usage

35. Increase in Usage

36. 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)

37. 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?

38. 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

39. Searching for books by colour

40. Search visualisations

41. Search visualisations

42. CKO visualisations

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

44. 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/

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

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

52. 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 )

54. 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 ”

55. 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”)

56. 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

57. 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

58. 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

59. Implementation of Features

60. Features – Future Trends?

61. Importance (getting soon)

62. Technology Adoption Lifecycle

63. Technology Adoption - Now

64. Technology Adoption – Q1 08?

65. Importance – UK respondents

66. Thank you!