ALA Midwinter IUG SIG Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0
update: PDF version with space for notes
Web 2.0 and other ?2.0? monikers have become loaded terms recently. But as we look back at the world wide web of 1996, there can be little doubt that today’s web is better and more useful. Indeed, that seems to be the conclusion millions of Americans are making, as current estimates show over 200 million users in the US, including 87% of youth 12-17.
Web 2.0 isn’t driven by technology, it’s driven by that critical mass of users. And while social software and AJAX enabled web applications get most of our attention, people are turning to the internet for some very mundane everyday activities that were little more than science fiction in 1996. The commonality of internet banking, for example, reflects the trust users now have in the security and reliability of online services.
But the web has weathered so much hype and hyperbole that it may be difficult to recognize its arrival as a true cultural force. Computing has become so common that children often learn to type before they learn to write. And the instant, self-service access to worlds of information and services is changing industries — a fact we can see clearly in the decline of the role of travel agents, even while air travel continues to grow.
Kevin Kelly, in a Wired Magazine story described this apparent blindness:
The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. [thanks to Josh Porter for alerting me to this]
So the question of how to design a web OPAC for today is a question of how to design an information service in a world rich with information services and filled with users who make information seeking — though not necessarily at libraries — part of their everyday lives.
3 Comments
Hey I was just surfing around and decided to post a short comment here. I run a movie review message board and am looking for people to write reviews and contribute at my forum. You can even post a link to your blog on your signature file at my forum. It’s all good! Take care.
Wow!Who really knows where this technology will take us in the end.
The hyperlinks to the quicktime movie and the PDF give me an error message: “You have requested a page that is not currently available due to data transfer restrictions.”
34 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] « Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 [...]
[...] Casey Bissonå?¨ALA Midwinter IUG 2006æ??ä½?ç??精彩æ¼?讲Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0(ä½?积æ¯?è¾?大æ??20å¤?M)(via Bisson’s blog) [...]
Innovative Users Group
[...]My notes from Casey’s session ended up being quite extensive so what follows is what I could hurriedly type while he was talking. If you are interested in this stuff check out the presentation on his website or if you are attending Code4Lib 2006 catch the show there.[...]
Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0
I just watched the Flash movie of Casey Bisson’s ALA Midwinter presentation, Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0. I could only see the slides, so don’t know what was actually said. The slide content, though, seemed spot on to…
[...] And here’s the library connection: We will all struggle with questions of relevancy in this new world. Inevitably, this will require us to examine our core values and change our services, but the results will be magical. As never before has the technology been available to so connect questions with answers, patrons with libraries. [...]
Remembering San Antonio
[...]Casey Bisson from New Hampshire talked about adapting the opac to the needs and expectations of users. He was particularly inspired by two books - “Ambient Findability” and “The Wisdom of the Crowd,” giving a few free copies to librarians who promised to talk them up. Casey was my favorite speaker last spring at IUG, and he did not disappoint today, although this talk was a bit more theoretical than his San Francisco speech. Anyway, this is someone to watch.[...]
[...] I’m going to avoid the question of whether libraries should be trying to offer services inside Facebook, and instead ask the question of how well our existing services work for those using Facebook. If students are collaborating, they’re likely sharing URLs, but our OPACs and databases often aren’t bookmarkable, making it difficult to exchange links to those resources (and instructions like these don’t help either). And if somebody blogs about one of our items, our catalogs don’t support comments or trackbacks, making it a one-sided conversation. Facebook and other online services are important to our patrons, and we would do well to think about how information is exchanged using those technologies. We would do well to build services that interoperate with the internet that people are using. [...]
[...] Check out Maisson Baison’s presentation to the ALA Midwinter meeting, entitled Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0. Honestly, the prototype wordpress powered OPAC is pretty amazing and would be a powerful tool for libraries once fully developed and implemented. [...]
[...] Casey Brisson, programador de sistemas de la Biblioteca de la universidad de Plymouth, ha creado un prototipo de OPAC en formato blog. Dicho OPAC, está bajo la plataforma WordPress y entre otras caracterÃsticas cuenta con una página propia para cada registro (enlace permanente), la posibilidad de añadir comentarios, trackbacks y, por supuesto, etiquetas. Además los registros pueden ser indexados por motores de búsqueda externos como google, yahoo o incluso technorati. Incluye la disponibilidad de los ejemplares en otras bibliotecas y en librerÃas virtuales como Amazon. En Flickr hay disponibles algunas capturas del OPAC y en el blog del autor un vÃdeo de la presentación [...]
OPACs old and new, Ms. Jessamyn goes to Washington
[...]This brings me to my next topic, sparked by Jenny Levine’s TechSource post about Library 2.0 in the Real World and my new pal Casey who maybe you’ve heard of. Casey Bisson built an OPAC prototype that runs on WordPress. No, seriously, look. It will run with any vendor’s ILS. He talked about it at ALA well before I got there, and people were buzzing about it all week. Not only is it a clever hack, it’s clean, simple, unbranded and highly functional in ways that seem pretty obvious to bloghappy me. I’d love to see a prototype running publicly so that he could get some feedback from folks who maybe don’t come from the born-with-the-chip generation.[...]
Library 2.0 in the Real World
[...]One of Casey’s theories that resonates with me is a fundamental mistake librarians make: assuming that the OPAC has to be part of the Integrated Library System (ILS). In other words, if you buy a specific vendor’s product with which to do your cataloging, acquisitions, serials, etc., then you are stuck using that vendor’s online catalog. Unless, of course, you have one or more programmers to completely rewrite the catalogâ??and let’s face it, there just aren’t that many libraries with those kinds of resources.[...]
[...] Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 « MaisonBisson.com (tags: library OPAC) [...]
OPACs in the world of Library 2.0
[...]That’s what Casey has done by taking the OPAC into his own programming hands. His creation is a beautiful thing that offers comments, RSS feeds, book reviews and other niftiness that would give the proverbial online bookseller a run for its money. Check out his screenshots on flickr — don’t forget to read the comments![...]
[...] Circulation records can be subpoenaed, but getting at the reading list I’ve been keeping as bookmarks in my browser is more likely to require officials to serve me with a search warrant. Building systems that work with the internet puts users in charge of their own privacy decisions. [...]
[...] Keep reading: the language of your website, institutional blogging done right, and designing library services for today. [...]
[...] It’s nice to be noticed by fellow blogging librarians in other parts of the world. Thanks to the laughinglibrarian for linking my post regarding cassey bisson’s OPAC 2.0. [...]
The OPAC is not an end in itself
The ever-interesting John Blyberg has written a thought provoking post that picks up various threads from current discussions around the future - or otherwise - of that much maligned public face to library services; the Online Public Access Catalogue,…
2006: Year of the phoenix OPAC?
Another great January moment was seeing Casey Bisson’s Wordpress OPAC project which poses some intrinsic questions about the nature of our relationship to the ILS and OPAC as well as with our vendors.
[...] This sucks, it doesn’t do X, and your plan for Y is all wrong. You’re probably right. The plan here is to build a framework that let’s us ask questions, build possible solutions, and share them easily. The only thing I’m certain of is our need to find ways to make our systems easier to use, easier to extend, and integrated into the larger stream of progress that’s shaping the internet that over 200 million Americans are making an essential part of their lives. Take this as an invitation to get involved, there’s lots to do. [...]
[...] The experimentation and development going on in libraries around the world makes me think that one charatcteristic of Library 2.0 is that the library functions as a laboratory for development. This can take many forms. The OPAC experimentation that Casey Bisson does with WordPress, Ann Arbor Public Library and their superpatron does stuff with Amazon APIs that makes me sit up and think, and elsewhere other experiments are changig the library both in the electronic and physical world. If we start to regard change as a “normal” situation as I suspect you have to do in a lab, then maybe we can have a go at realizing what Michael Casey wrote about having to live with constant change. This sounds slightly threatening to me, so thinking about the library as a lab and myself as a slightly demented scientist/librarian helps me accept the concept of change as a permanent fixture of library life and even enjoy the process. No lightning-rods on the roof yet… Of course the next step is to let the library be a lab for library users as well. Start having video recording and editing equipment in the library. Let kids play around with it and publish the result on the library webpage or videoblog. Of course everyone is welcome to record their podcast in the library sound-studio or try out other new technologies as the library makes the latest stuff available to users (after letting the library staff play around with it first). Experiment with interfaces, both in the physical world and virtually. Let the users comment, on the blog or on the desk, invite comments as you change and try out things, don’t just present the final product. You let yourself wide open to critisism, but also to valuable input that might improve what you try to do, or let you drop a failed idea before you spend too much resources on it. [...]
The Web 2.0 challenge to the OPAC
[...] The way of Bisson is a good example of how Library 2.0 can contribute to both the development of libraries and a wonderful addition to the social web. The example shows how useful a catalog can be, and also how libraries must open up their reserv…
Evolutionary Technology and the Emerging Divide
At my library we’re in the final stages of crafting our next technology plan, and we’ve been under a lot of pressure to find a showstopper, an eye-catching new technology to insert into it. But there’s a problem. New…
[...] I’ve been making a lot of noise about Coates’ point number five in my own presentations about how to build an OPAC for Web 2.0 (though the lesson should be applied to every library application), but there’s a lot to like in all nine. And it’s a bunch easier to understand his point when you read Zawodny’s take on it. [...]
[...] OPAC. Lenke til Casey Bissons presentasjon i San Antonio, Texas (ALA Midwinter Meeting 2006) [...]
[...] Bisson, Casey. “Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0″, MaisonBisson blog, January 20, 2006. < http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11096/> [...]
[...] My second reaction was a question of how our systems will support these extra-library interactions. Can people quickly and easily trade URLs to access the library materials they’re talking about? Will library systems ever be as easy to use as the game/social environments we’re trying to use them in? [...]
[...] Here is the web 2.0 OPAC design post…also some screenshots. [...]
[...] OPAC. Lenke til Casey Bissons presentasjon i San Antonio, Texas (ALA Midwinter Meeting 2006) [...]
[...] We talk here and there about how â??libraries build community,â? but how does that work in the online world? How do our systems support or inhibit community discussions online? [...]
[...] Friday afternoon I attended a very popular presentation by Casey Bisson: Designing OPAC for Web 2.0. Even though I skipped lunch, ran to the conference center some 20 minutes into his presentation and took copious notes throughout, I could have just lolligagged along the Riverwalk, because you can find his entire presentation captured live in Quicktime -see hyperlink above. (Firefox users beware: my browser crashed all 3 times when I tried to open the link.) [...]
[...] “Evolutionary Technology and the Emerging Divide” by Michael Casey at LibraryCrunch. Where are we with “library technology” now? Are we in an evolutionary or revolutionary period? Programming being done by Casey Bisson and John Blyerg point to some of the revolutionary things that can be done with small, evolutionary, tools. What will result from these efforts will be amazing, and I am very anxious to see where we are in two or three years with their services. This illustrates the one item that we cannot put on our Emerging Tech suggestion list, a programmer. [...]
[...] WPOpac attempts to separate the “management” side of things from the public interface. The software is Open Source and well used, so it has hundreds more people working on it than any ILS. As Casey says… The only thing Iâ??m certain of is our need to find ways to make our systems easier to use, easier to extend, and integrated into the larger stream of progress thatâ??s shaping the internet …. [...]
[...] been more than a year since I first demonstrated Scriblio (was WPopac) at ALA Midwinter in San Antonio. More than a year since NCSU debuted their [...]
[...] » Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (tags: web2.0 wordpress) [...]
Post a Comment