» 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.

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.

google economy, google in the catalog, lib20, libraries, library, library 20, library catalog, linking, links, loosely linked, opac, remix, search engines, wpopac

3 Comments

Nick Baker

Posted May 5, 2006 at 11:37 am | Permalink

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.
John

Posted May 20, 2006 at 4:05 am | Permalink

great site!
Ken

Posted May 24, 2006 at 3:20 pm | Permalink

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

3 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

By links for 2006-05-05 at ebyblog on 05 May 2006 at 2:23 am

[...] WPopac Gets Googled Â« MaisonBisson.com (tags: google libraries code4lib) [...]
By Spamming Google with the OPAC at ebyblog on 08 May 2006 at 10:59 am

[...] 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. [...]
By Linkability Is Community « MaisonBisson.com on 15 May 2006 at 11:03 am

[...] 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. [...]

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