WPopac Gets Googled
A discussion on Web4Lib last month raised the issue of Google indexing our library catalogs. My answer spoke of the huge number of searches being done in search engines every day and the way that people increasingly expect that anything worth finding can be found in Google.
There were doubts about the effectiveness of such plans, and concerns about how frustrating it might be for a searcher in California to find books (that he or she can’t access) in New Hampshire.
My answer to the first point was that once we start participating in the Google Economy, we’ll find our records well represented within it, and my answer to the second point is that we already have good solutions to that problem: ILL and OpenWorldCat. Examples: a Google search for my favorite author/friend/example returns with WPopac among the top results. And if you view one of the resulting records, you’ll see a link to “find in WorldCat Libraries.”
Thing is, it’s not just the stuff I’ve been linking to as examples that’s getting found in search engines. Listed below are the top 100 incoming search terms to WPopac from major search engines in the last week. The list is generated by bsuite, my multipurpose WordPress plugin, and the links lead to the item found with the search terms.
- What works: documenting energy conservation in buildings
- Online Recording of Pomp and Circumstance
- recording of pomp and circumstance
- harry stack sullivan
- miguel de unamuno website
- “cathedrals +england”
- athalie
- symbols in art
- Dadaism by Marcel Duchamp and Frances Picabia
- frank moake
- william luijpen
- “Man, Culture and Society”
- music scores elgar wand of youth slumber song
- Cats and Bats and Things with Wings by Conrad AIken
- paul cuffe african american
- biography of george e. mowry
- don giovanni libretto italian english
- Steroids-opposing viewpoints
- ballet plot
- ballet plots
- grice, h.p., studies in the way of words
- african american identity
- Allan Freed and the Big Beat
- The Blue Octavo Notebooks
- The Self Reliant Potter
- kartinki
- the little brown book of anecdotes
- “the fields are full”+“Armstrong Gibbs”
- forty french songs for voice and piano
- Fantasien, Op. 116
- Literary Themes
- biography ramses the great
- ramses II essays
- Rita Rapoza
- deutsche nobelpreisträger
- Erotica
- ‘henry and mudge and the green time’ website
- “Henry and Mudge in the Green Time”
- tally’s corner
- ECCENTRIC MUSCLE LOADING BASEBALL
- indian mythology 0600023699
- climacteric psychology menopause
- emilie flöge
- Brigance Comprehensive inventory of basic skills
- Brigance Diagnostic Comprehensive Inventory of Basic Skills
- Brigance Diagnostic Inventory of Basic Skills
- brigance diagnostic
- Brigance INventory of Basic Skills
- brigance inventory
- brigance testing
- Brigance
- Metropolitan readiness tests
- Bayley assessment kit
- kaja silverman “fragments of a fashionable discourse”
- palmer hayden biography african-american
- feminist theories on battered women syndrome
- otis lennon mental ability test
- otis-lennon intelligence test
- Otis-Lennon School Ability Test
- Poetry from norton anthology of by s.m.gilbert and susan gubar woman writer
- Black Frontiers
- Pioneers Of The American West.
- joycelyn elders biography
- pros and cons of tqm
- Encyclopedia of world biography
- Death Penalty:an historical& Theological survey,J.J.Megivern
- “Jewish Deliberations on Suicide: Exceptions, Toleration and Assistance” — Noam Zohar
- Samuel H. Kress biography
- biomechanical analysis leg stretching
- arguments against suicide
- assisted suicide
- assited suicide
- physician assisted suicide cartoons
- “ice age”+homophobia
- suite española Gaspar Sanz
- leprosy:king baldwin IV
- Socolow The women of colonial Latin America.
- popular music and youth culture
- mandarin revolution Keynes
- sports professionalization test
- “criminology theories, patterns, and typologies”
- xiajia
- Pangwe Africa
- “hanif kureishi+life”
- All Shook Up: How Rock ‘n“ Roll Changed America
- Fraenkel and Wallen validity and reliability
- j.k. rowling biography isbn
- tina modotti biography
- essays on Rescuing a planet under stress
- criticism beatrix potter
- harry potter literary criticism
- ”Jewish Women in the Holocaust“
- crimes and misdemeanors plato
- California and the Southwest history
- Life In the American West
- funny chemistry caricature
- di vinci ”symbols“
- di vinci symbols
- Symbols of japan
- biograph dewey
Some links will leave you scratching your head, others are clearly misdirected. But, I’m especially proud of this link, from a person who was especially happy to get a new book. Making our collections indexable also makes them linkable, and that means people can make libraries part of their lives — wherever their lives take them.
And this doesn’t just help Angie, it means faculty and students can link to library resources from class blogs or share them in AIM.
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[...] WPopac Gets Googled « MaisonBisson.com (tags: google libraries code4lib) [...]
I tuned out the discussion on web4lib after a while, but I had considered doing something similar for our catalog, so that when users search our site (which is powered by Google) they would get catalog hits as well as regular library web pages. Half the time they don’t know what they’re searching anyway.
[...] While I like the ideas behind WPOpac, I have to disagree with Casey’s post about exposing the information to Google. I actually have no problem with exposing, as you can do what you want, but I don’t think it’s very helpful as is and would hope if more libraries do it that Google takes action and moves the results to the bottom. The information on most OPAC’s pages are only useful to a few people and it would make more sense to have it only show up when they include the library name or something similar. It looks ok know and seems like it might be a good idea to have it wide open and high results but that’s only because very few are doing it. When I search for an author or book the last thing I want is 20 pages of results for different libraries that all tell me nothing. Casey does include a link to WorldCat but it presumes you know what “worldcat libraries” is. [...]
[...] It’s hard to know how Fuzzyfruit found the WPopac catalog page for A Baby Sister for Frances (though it is ranked fifth in a Google search for the title), but what matters is that she did find it, and she was able to link to it by simply copying the URL from her browser’s location bar. [...]
great site!
Great work Mr. Bisson! I’ll show your work to our faculty library! They use a manual system from the 60’s. It’s a pain trying to find something there if you don’t know exactly the author or the name of the book!
Cheers,
Ken