WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed
First things first, this thing probably needs a better name, but I’m not up to the task. Got ideas? Post in the comments. For the rest of this, let’s just pretend it’s an interview.
What is WPopac? It’s an OPAC — a library catalog, for my readers outside libraries — inside the framework of WordPress, the hugely popular blog management application.
Why misuse WordPress that way? WordPress has a a few things we care about built-in: permalinks, comments, and trackbacks (and a good comment spam filter), just to start. But it also offers something we’ve never seen in a library application before: access to a community of knowledge, programmers, and designers outside libraries. Because the core of WPopac is WordPress, and because it preserves WordPress’s rich plugin API and themes structure, it already has more users, designers, developers, and administrators than all the ILS vendors combined.
So, down with the ILS? Well, no. There are some brave souls working on full-fledged open-source ILSs, but that’s not my goal here. The ILS does a lot of stuff I don’t want to be responsible for, like the acquisitions workflow and financial, inventory, and circulation management. When you peak inside your ILS, you realize there’s a lot there you don’t want to have fix.
So, we have to have both an ILS and WPopac? Well, you don’t have to have anything, but if you want it, at least WPopac is free, extensible, and open-source. Less flippant answer: yes, it does assume there’s an ILS in the background somewhere, but more than a few people see potential for projects like this to serve underfunded libraries that may lack automation. That could be interesting.
But blog posts are unstructured and library data is full of structure. What gives? The standard WordPress content database is buttressed with extra tables to represent all the bibliographic information in its atomic detail. But even the ‘unstructured’ data takes some clues from the microformats camp, putting everything in XML parsable XHTML.
How’s that work again? Well, let me be careful here. I’m not proposing WPopac as a solution, rather as a framework for building a solution. That said, you can get a pretty good idea of how the first draft of this concept works by looking at a real record (be sure to view the source, as there are some hidden divs in there). But if you don’t like that, you can change the look by fiddling with the stylesheet or switching themes, and you can change the content with the WordPress API or by changing the way it’s loaded in the first place.
Further, because all the bibliographic data is there in its atomic detail, plugins can use and display that data anywhere on the page. Try a search to see how I’m using that data in the right column to improve findability, as in my clustered search results prototype from last fall.
So, does that mean I can do XYZ that I’ve wanted to do? Maybe. Anybody who knows how to write a WordPress plugin can take a stab at playing with all that data. The “refine search” content in the right column, and the “alternate searches” content at the bottom is generated that way. Try this one: I’ve finally got the Wikipedia results I’ve always wanted in the catalog, just look in the right column. Or take a look at the “add to del.icio.us” link in the record display, that’s generated by a regular wordpress plugin written by Arne Brachhold, who wasn’t thinking of libraries or OPACs when he wrote it. And down at the bottom of the page you’ll see the a list of related works that’s built by my own bsuite plugin. Want COinS-PMH/unAPI? The interface and all the data are there to make it happen, and here’s a good plugin to start from.
So no guarantees, but hey, give it a try. And if you run into trouble you’ll be among hundreds of thousands of WordPress users and supported by a huge community of plugin and theme authors.
What about RSS, XML, OpenSearch? WordPress solves the RSS feed for us (look at this URL to see). A feature-complete XML API, is a bit further off, but maybe somebody wants to pitch in to help solve that one? And full OpenSearch support, taking advantage of the suggested and alternate search features, is my next big project (here’s where I’m going with that).
This is awesome, can I run it at my library? Well, Jenny called dibs… But, really, this project started with my attempts to find a way to make my work sharable, so, yes. Call me a dreamer, but I find the notion of a community of libraries sharing plugins and code changes really exciting. But right now, there are three major components — the data importer, the plugin, and some modifications to the WordPress baseline code — and all of them need a little more work to make them distributable. Stay tuned.
This sucks, it doesn’t do X, and your plan for Y is all wrong. You’re probably right. This is my first stab at a really big problem, and there’s a lot that isn’t done and certainly a few things I didn’t think of. 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.
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Casey Bisson’s WordPress OPAC hits the web
Last week, I wrote about Casey Bisson’s intriguing experiment, leveraging the capabilities of the WordPress blogging software to begin to explore some of the ways in which an OPAC might evolve. Yesterday, Casey posted again, and it looks as…
[...] « WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed [...]
[...] Casey Maison has been doing a lot of writing and thinking about how to make ILS systems more social — and as such, has created a testbed application using WordPress to sit ontop of their library opac. His original post can be found here: WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed. Its an interesting idea and I mention it simply because it falls into my musings of last week regarding the wisedom of dedicating the limited resources in the library community at developing an ILS (Develop the library’s OPAC? Maybe not…) – something that I see as being more and more marginalized in the future library infrastructure. Of course, I’m coming at this from the research library community, where it seems this movement is happenning much faster than in other communities. [...]
I’m not even remotely envolved in library happenings, but somehow this is exciting. casey, you are doing something really great!
Neat! I wonder how WP database engine which is mySQL based, will handle MARC Records already established in existing ILS?
WoPac 2.0 sounds better than WPopac though.
[...] I made the point that I was ignoring business aspects of the ILS when I introduced WPopac, but today Art made the point that there are already good solutions to handle the acquisitions workflow of our ILSs. [...]
[...] Over at MaisonBisson.com Casey has been playing with a prototype of a WordPress plugin that would function as an OPAC. [...]
I see you’ve got some suggested searches happening in your OpenSearch implementation. Congrats on being among the very first… I haven’t even implemented it myself yet
Btw, I tried a search for ‘google’, and one of the book titles had an ampersand that wasn’t properly escaped, so the XML wasn’t well-formed (and thus not displying on A9.com).
[...] The conference finished up just before noon today. The coolest thing presented? This version of an OPAC that works from within WordPress. I kid you not. It’s a proof of concept to prove the point that the software needs/solutions of libraries aren’t special, aren’t unordinary, and that we can and should find ways to leverage off of existing software whenever possible instead of developing software for a relatively small community — compare, for example, the number of people using and developing WordPress plugins/extensions to the total number of people developing software in libraries. Which community of folks do you think is larger? And larger usually translates into more/better support and sustainability. [...]
Michael: thanks for the tip, I’ll look into the issue and fix it. And thanks also for noticing the suggested searches thing. It’s not working exactly as I’d like it, but they’re my favorite feature of the OpenSearch spec.
I’m sure Michael will be happy to read that the suggested searches is your favorite part of the OpenSearch spec — he is the one who deserves credit for adding to the specification.
[...] My code4lib 2006 presentation included discussion not only of (WPopac, my open source OPAC based on WordPress, but also a plea for us within the libraries to look outside our community for practices and standards that are in use and supported by larger populations than we can ever hope for on our own. WPopac is one attempt at that, using an application that can already claim “hundreds of thousands†of current users and many thousands of developers. Amazon offers another example, boasting 140,000 registered developers of its API, making it the defacto standard for the exchange of bibliographic information online. Meanwhile, our community of programmers within libraries, which is far smaller than 1% of Amazon’s registered API users, must contend with dozens of metadata standards (MARC, MODS, METS, DC, etc., etc., etc.) and communication interfaces (SRU/SRW, z39.50, and more) to do substantially similar work. [...]
[...] So what’s my angle? WPopac rocks, and performance is excellent with my test corpus (160,000 bib records) on even a lowly single-CPU server with only 1GB of RAM, despite the fact that each bib record is represented in both its composed form in the wp_posts table and as about 20 more rows per record in a separate table (yup, I’ve got almost 3 million rows representing every atomic detail of every bib record), and all of this is full-text indexed. [...]
[...] Nell’ambito delle sperimentazioni sui nuovi opac, una menzione speciale va riservata a WPOPAC: creato da Maison Bisson all’interno della piattaforma di pubblicazione per blog WordPress, WPOPAC tratta i record catalografici, pur suddivisi in segmenti di informazione bibliografica ricercabile, come i post di un blog. [...]
[...] It’s all managed using the same tools we use to approve, moderate, and edit comments, which also means the spam filtering that works for comments works for contributed tags too. And because bsuite is already part of WPopac, that means it gains the new tagging features too. [...]
[...] 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. [...]
[...] One thing I have missed in the Library 2.0 discussion is the link between the physical library and the digital dimension. Yes, we use our OPAC to show what items we have, and Casey Bissons WordPress OPAC shows a possible future for the OPAC, but the actual link between the physical book and the catalog record is not a very strong one. Now I wonder if RFID might not be the missing link. [...]
[...] read about it here [...]
Paul Miller on Web 2.0 / Library 2.0 — CIL2006
Paul Miller, Talis’ Technology Evangelist, spoke Friday afternoon to a packed audience in the Jefferson Room at CIL 2006. Paul, who I was surprised and impressed to learn holds a PhD in archeology from the University of York, is a…
[...] WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed [...]
[...] I’ve whittled things down to the point where the only baseline change from WordPress 2.0.2 is in the next_posts_link function of the wp-includes/template-functions-links.php file. The change is necessary because WPopac rewrites the SQL search queries in a way that’s incompatible with a piece of this function, but necessary for performance reasons. [...]
[...] WPopac takes advantage of MySQL’s indexing and relevance-ranked searching (go ahead, try it), including boolean searching (on MySQL versions > 4.x). Here are some details and examples taken wholesale from the MySQL manual: [...]
Nice blog. Excellent job.
[...] Here is the release post of WPopac …from the post: “…offers something we’ve never seen in a library application before: access to a community of knowledge, programmers, and designers outside libraries. Because the core of WPopac is WordPress, and because it preserves WordPress’s rich plugin API and themes structure, it already has more users, designers, developers, and administrators than all the ILS vendors combined.” [...]
[...] När jag funderar på hur (och varför!) bibliotekskataloger ska användas är det många frågor som söker svar. Därmed inte sagt att jag tror att det finns precisa svar på mina frågor, utan det här är något som kommer att förändras med ny teknik och nytt tänk. Innehåll Vilket innehåll ska det vara i katalogerna? och Hur ska de fyllas med innehåll? 2.0 idén handlar ju mycket om medverkan. Vill vi inte kunna få in t.ex. kommentarer eller tags från användarna som en del av katalogen? Det är redan idag möjligt t.ex. i WPopac – ett försök att göra en katalog med ett bloggverktyg. Läs mer om den i bloggen OMIS. [...]
[...] As I was working on the book and it started getting longer and longer… and longer, it became clear to me that I was going to have to cut some topics that I’d planned to cover. My book proposal included a few things that one may not define as social software but that I thought fit into the larger dialogue about the Read/Write Web and the evolving view of how Web pages/applications/middleware should be designed for our users. As my word count got longer and longer, some of those things had to be left out. One of those was Web services. I had written a chapter on Web services and did an interview for the chapter with Casey Bisson, who does amazing things with liwbrary middleware (see his WPopac and an explanation). And while I was not particularly sad to see my stunningly inadequate description of Web services go by the wayside, I was very sad that people would not have the opportunity to read Casey’s insights into why our systems suck and what Web services could mean for libraries. [...]
[...] 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. [...]
[...] Library Catalogs Should Be Like WordPress Library catalogs should be be like WordPress. That is, every entry should support comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks. Every record should have a permalink. Content should be tag-able. The look should be easily customizable with themes. Everything should be available via RSS or Atom. It should be extendable with a rich plugin API. And when that fails, it would be nice if it were all written in a convenient language like PHP so we can hack it ourselves. Beside the part about “written in a convenient language like PHP”, this would make library catalogs much more useful and entertaining. However, it would also add complexity and spam issues. Amazon has recently started a similar approach to their listings including adding a customer wiki. Thanks to Eric Schnell who posted a detailed review of the original thought and some insight into Wordpress OPAC or WOPAC. This is already getting some press in library circles. Technorati Tags: OPAC WOPAC wordpress [...]
[...] Al di là della realizzazione di WPOpac in sè, mi piace sottolineare l’idea, che Bisson ha esposto già diverso tempo fa in un post dal titolo più che esplicito: Library Catalogs Should Be Like WordPress: That is, every entry should support comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks. Every record should have a permalink. Content should be tag-able. The look should be easily customizable with themes. Everything should be available via RSS or Atom. It should be extendable with a rich plugin API. [...]
[...] Link. [...]
[...] I’ve been exploring this with my WPopac project, and I’ve seen some interesting results in the four months that it’s been live and available to the public. One example is that a web search for “joe monninger†returns the WPopac page as the top result. Elsewhere, WPopac content is appearing in blogs (examples: Fuzzyfruit and Angie) and as a result A Baby Sister For Frances is now the only non-commercial result in the first page of Google results. [...]
What I most like about this is the potential for RSS heads-up on new library acquisitions. Many patrons love any New Books feature.
What I least like about this is the built-in WordPress most-recent-at-top. I’ve found in other WP implementations as well that automatically or communally maintained blogs could use a “Make this sticky” feature that would keep the really important or interesting items first. This wouldn’t affect people reading the items via RSS, but would probably make things more interesting for those who use the site in their browser.
[tags]WordPress, sticky posts, library[/tags]
[...] Because it’s a short program, I’ll only be able to gloss over some of the discussion of what’s wrong with our catalogs and how we’re fixing them, and while there’s a lot to say about WPopac, I’ll have to leave it to Jenny Levine to explain most of it. [...]
[...] It’s about WPopac, of course, but the excitement now is that the presentation would be the story of the first library outside PSU to implement it. WPopac is an open source replacement for a library’s online catalog that improves the usability, findability, and remixability of the library’s collection. [...]
[...] WPopac, a project I started on my nights and weekends, is now officially one of my day-job projects too. [...]
[...] WPopac is OfficialMaison Bisson has revealed that his library has been using WPopac since February 2006. On the basic level, it’s the use of Wordpress, a blogging software, as a Web Catalogue. It allows for comments and reviews to be posted by readers. There is also Technorati tags for easy searching. His library plans to release the source code for WPopac in the near future. Would be good to see if we can use this for our Web Catalogue.(via MaisonBisson). [...]
[...] Could this be the start of the future of OPACs? Casey Bisson has developed an OPAC that is built using the WordPress Weblog Platform. I think this is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly it was initially developed as a personal project that he worked on at night and on weekends. Secondly it means an OPAC gains access to some of the Web 2.0 / Library 2.0 technologies we’ve been hearing about lately. Lastly, and most importantly, it’s being used now by the Lamson Library at Plymouth State University. There is also a plan to release the source code so others can build on the work of Casey, which is encouraging. [...]
Hi
Exciting stuff.
Dunno if you’ll find it interesting, I have been implimenting WordPress as part bookshop catalogue at David Krut Publishing.
[tags]WordPress, Bookshop[/tags]
[...] Here’s a live sample of Wpopac conceptualized by maissonbisson. I just wish I’d know how they entered the bibliographic records? Manually one by one, or they used another application to convert MARC records into mySQL data.? Or they capture live data from their existing library database system?But the OPAC is pretty neat. Looks easy to search, with the tagging features of an ordinary blog and entries are displayed in a nifty fashion. [...]
[...] WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed Someone’s figured out how to combine WordPress with OPAC, essentially creating a true library blog! [...]
[...] WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed [...]
[...] WPOpac Published by Jason Griffey August 17th, 2006 in Digital Culture Tags: library, LITA, web2.0. library, LITA web2.0 Wow…I’m a little late to the party, but this has such potential I thought I needed to blog it. Casey Bisson has done some amazing integration work to combine his OPAC with a WordPress blog. I’m still playing with features, but it seems like an amazing tool for refining search. Plus, it’s just a mind-freakingly difficult thing to pull off…most OPAC’s don’t play well with others. I’m completely impressed that it even works…this is like convincing Microsoft Word to integrate with iTunes. Huge props to Corey for making this work. [...]
[...] At the WordCamp after-party I chatted with Casey Bisson, a New Hampshire man who is developing a WordPress-based social library catalog called WPopac. Check out Plymouth State University’s Lamson Library WPopac. This thing might make you want to read more books; time-crunched beware. [...]
[...] “Catalogablog” est le titre du blogue de David Bigwood, bibliothécaire à Houston, biblioblogue focalisé sur les questions de catalogage. Comment alors appeler l’hybride Opac-blogue que tente la bibliothèque de Plymouth State University et que signale Nicolas dans son butinage du jour? WPopac? le promoteur de l’expérience reconnait que c’est pas terrible. [...]
[...] Wow: megszületett az elsÅ‘ blog-alapú OPAC, a WordPress motorra épÃtett WPopac. Casey Bisson a Plymouth State University Lamson Library-nak készÃtette ezt az alkalmazást, amely átvette a blogok minden hasznos tulajdonságát: permalinkek, kommentek és tackback-ek. De nem csak ez az elÅ‘nye, hanem mivel a WP-nek hatalmas tábora van, ezért könyvtáron kÃvüli emberek is fejlesztik a különbözÅ‘ API-kal és stÃluslapokkal. Ez a rendszer nem kÃvánja leváltani az integrált könyvtári rendszereket (azok számtalan olyan feladatot látnak el, amelyeket kifejleszteni az új rendszerben eléggé nehéz feladat lenne), a régiekkel párhuzamosan haladva azonban kiválóan használható. Egyik hatalmas elÅ‘nye az ingyenesség és a nyÃlt forráskód, Ãgy nem kell drágán megvásárolni, illetve a fejlesztéseket külön-külön beszerezni, ill. nem kell egyeztetnia fejlesztÅ‘kkel, ha az embernek egy jó ötlete támad. A WP-t programozni nem túl nehéz feladat (bevallom, én még nem láttam neki, tekintve, hogy egyelÅ‘re nincs saját “lakhelyem”, Ãgy kénytelen vagyok beérni az instant szolgáltatásokkal), Ãgy bárki néhány hét-hónap alatt beletudja magát annyira ásni a rendszerbe, hogy ne okozzon problémát egy-egy kisebb (késÅ‘bb aztán nagyobb) módosÃtás kivitelezése. És ami szintén nem hátrány: valószÃnűleg rá fog annyira cuppani a nép (úgy általában, tehát az USA-tól Japánig a WP- és könyvtár-felhasználók), hogy özönleni fognak a plugin-ek. [...]
This looks really interesting, when is the source going to become available?
[...] Cassey Bisson is going to talk about the OPAC WPOpac The idea is to reveal the catalog to the patron. How do we reveal this and what items should we reveal? [...]
[...] Felbuzdulva a WPopac-on már egy hete azon agyazok, hogy milyen jóság lenne csinálni egy valami hasonlót, mondjuk hÃvjuk TOPAC-nak (jaja, T-Com, T-Online, T-Mobile… szóval Tagged Online Public Access Catalog). Például a Scuttle nyÃlt forráskódú tagelÅ‘t lehetne integrálni egy OPAC-ba (bár, ha már esetleg több könyvtár használ/na ilyen rendszert, akkor célszerű függetlenÃteni tÅ‘le), Ãgy egy rakat új fÃcsör jelenne meg egy csapásra: [...]
[...] One good example is WPOpac developed by Casey Bisson. WPOpac uses the WordPress open source blog hosting system as a front end for the libraries catalogue. This allows the library to harness typical blog elements such as tags and comments to enhance user navigation and interpretation of bibliographic records. Additionally, as Jenny Levine points out, search engines can easily index the entire catalogue because each item has its own static, perma-link-able page. Jenny also highlights that, by choosing an open source product like WordPress “anyone who knows how to write a WordPress plugin can now enhance the OPAC—which suddenly opens the field to potentially thousands of new helpers.” [...]
[...] I continue to be inspired by WPopac, Corey Bisson’s reformulation of the library catalog using WordPress. Corey calls WPopac “an OPAC 2.0 Testbed”. In this case, WordPress is just the means of bringing the library catalog into the 21st Century, with open standards and flexible interfaces. [...]
[...] WPopac, <http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11133/> [...]
[...] 2006. szeptember 26. Wow: megszületett az elsÅ‘ blog-alapú OPAC, a WordPress motorra épÃtett WPopac. Casey Bisson a Plymouth State University Lamson Library-nak készÃtette ezt az alkalmazást, amely átvette a blogok minden hasznos tulajdonságát: permalinkek, kommentek és tackback-ek. De nem csak ez az elÅ‘nye, hanem mivel a WP-nek hatalmas tábora van (jelenleg 350000 blog van bejegyezve csak a Wordpress.com-on, és akkor még nem is beszéltünk az önálló blogokról), ezért könyvtáron kÃvüli emberek is fejlesztik a különbözÅ‘ API-kal és stÃluslapokkal. Ez a rendszer nem kÃvánja leváltani az integrált könyvtári rendszereket (azok számtalan olyan feladatot látnak el, amelyeket kifejleszteni az új rendszerben eléggé nehéz feladat lenne), a régiekkel párhuzamosan haladva azonban kiválóan használható. Egyik hatalmas elÅ‘nye az ingyenesség és a nyÃlt forráskód, Ãgy nem kell drágán megvásárolni, illetve a fejlesztéseket külön-külön beszerezni, ill. nem kell egyeztetnia fejlesztÅ‘kkel, ha az embernek egy jó ötlete támad. A WP-t programozni nem túl nehéz feladat (bevallom, én még nem láttam neki, tekintve, hogy egyelÅ‘re nincs saját “lakhelyemâ€, Ãgy kénytelen vagyok beérni az instant szolgáltatásokkal), Ãgy bárki néhány hét-hónap alatt beletudja magát annyira ásni a rendszerbe, hogy ne okozzon problémát egy-egy kisebb (késÅ‘bb aztán nagyobb) módosÃtás kivitelezése. És ami szintén nem hátrány: valószÃnűleg rá fog annyira cuppani a nép (úgy általában, tehát az USA-tól Japánig a WP- és könyvtár-felhasználók), hogy özönleni fognak a plugin-ek.ÃllÃtólag lehet szidni meg dÃcsérni is, nekem az ötlet tetszik, és valahol szerintem erre felé kéne keresni a jövÅ‘ útját (ahh, de szép volt… ; ) [...]
[...] Casey Bisson, from Plymouth State Universty Library, has just received the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for his WPOpac, which uses Wordpress software to run the OPAC. You can see it in action here. Search to find your item, which displays as a post on which you can comment. [...]
[...] WPopac made an even bigger splash after winning a Mellon prize recently. WPopac (what’s an OPAC?), is a work-in-progress online library catalog that uses WordPress. There’s all sorts of potential for customer tagging, comments, RSS, trackback, relevant search. Good stuff. [...]
[...] Casey Bisson from Plymouth State University in New Hampshire has quite an interesting project he will be working on shortly, namely marrying the Library of Congress Catalog to WordPress! He plans on developing out WP-OPAC, or an online catalog for libraries using WordPress. He was recently awarded a Mellon Foundation grant, and I imagine this project will draw increased attention to open source applications in the academic library world as well as new found attention for WordPress in the educational realm more generally. Below is part of a press release that was forwarded to me a few minutes ago: WordPress is a popular format for blogs—an open-source content management system. It is also the backbone for WP-OPAC, a pushing-the-envelope project from Casey Bisson, information architect at Plymouth State University (PSU), NH, which will use Library of Congress (LC) catalog records and redistribute them free under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license or GNU. Bisson was presented with a $50,000 Mellon award for Technology Collaboration for the project at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting in Washington, DC, on December 4. PSU will use the money for the LC records. The WP-OPAC will allow users to tag and comment on records, which will be more readily searchable by search engines. [...]
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Um…am I blind or do you not provide a link to Wpopac? If it’s the main idea behind this blog post, shouldn’t there be a link to it right away in the first paragraph? I had to hunt around to find it…..
[...] WPOpac seems to have created the perfect format for such tools, but again, I don’t think they will be as useful unless libraries can somehow agree on how to share them. [...]
[...] FISH FISH: Free (as in kittens) Integrated Search Handler. But never, ever tell your patrons that (unless they want to know). Backranym it to “FISH Isn’t So Hard” or “Finding Instead of Searching Helps.” But let’s break down the orignial meaning: Free (as in kittens): This is a concept that I first heard from another SLS person, Pat Neal. While the open source/free software community commonly talks about the differences betwee free (as in speach - meaning that the soruce code is open, readable, and editable) and free (as in beer - meaning that there is no cost for the software), Pat talked about free (as in kittens - meaning that while there may not be a cost to the software there are vet bills, food costs, time for cuddling and playing, and dedication as the cat grows over time). FISH is built using only free software (speech and/or beer) but is certainly something that, like a kitten, has other costs in the form of hardware, staff time, and training. Integrated: While I may have just finished saying that the ILS needs to leave the building, the different modules of our system will certainly need to talk to each other. The difference is that we are developing from the very beginning around the concept of APIs. API stands for Application Programming Interface, and is really just a computer-code way for two different programs to exchange data quickly and smoothly - see Wikipedia for more information. Integrated also comes in to play with the hope that eventually we will be able to incorporate more and more co-search capabilities in the form of sidebars or direct integration into search results. Search: Here we get to the heart of the concept. What we have done is built a front-end for an API-based search. By using the incredibly powerful IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition, a free (beer) search engine built using Apache’s Lucene technology, we are able to provide relevancy-ranked responses that are displayed in a friendly environment [With a big thanks to the University of Rochester’s eXtensible Catalog presentation for verifying that we were on the right track here]. In other words, we aren’t doing the heavy lifting here. We extracted MARC records and then, thanks to the efforts of one of the system’s Specialists of Library Technologies, Andy Austin, parsed the MARC data into a MySQL database. The MySQL database is then used to build a series of dynamic webpages - one for each ISBN as well as pages for authors, illustrators, subjects, etc [hat tip to Casy Bisson’s WPopac here!]. We then asked OmniFind to crawl all of those pages into a cached index to allow searching. Long story short, it works like a charm! The searching is fast, and we are able to tweak relevancy, add synonyms and spelling errors, even highlight “featured results” - in other words, we have our own search engine. Handler: While we could have stopped there, a search engine that spits back search engine results, we went a step further by using the open source content management system Drupal to “handle” the results. Instead of this: We wanted something that would display covers and additional information on the initial results page. This is an early beta annoucement to share the proof of concept as we continue through development, but you can see the basic idea here: Approaching FISH as a search handler has also let us spend more time on developing our results display, and less time on the mechanics. By which I mean we can focus on finding instead of searching. Again, this is still very much in development, but we wanted to kick off the new year by sharing our progress. The system’s other Specialist of Library Technologies, Michael Nyerges, is bringing a wealth of experience to the development of our results interface. Here is a basic screenshot of where we are now with handled results. We will be adding integration with our book review module as well as sidebars to link with other searches and resources. The goal is to build on some of the ideas that have been put out there in the library world, but tweaked for the school environment. Our interface is going to look very different because we have different customers. One of the great things about using Drupal as a handler is that we can have entirely different interfaces based on the user’s login. [...]
[...] OPAC 應該å¯ä»¥èªªæ˜¯åœ–書館最é‡è¦çš„系統，說它是圖書館的命脈應該一點也ä¸ç‚ºéŽã€‚在 Library 2.0 (L2) è°é¡Œä¸ï¼ŒçœŸæ£å°‡ L2 應用到 OPAC 且被拿出來討論或舉例的有 NCSU åŠ AADL。å¦å¤–還有一ä½å€¼å¾—注æ„的人，Casey Bisson。 Casey Bisson æ˜¯å°‘æ•¸èƒ½å¤ åœ¨æ‰¹è©• OPAC 缺點的åŒæ™‚，åˆèƒ½å¤ 親自實ç¾ä»–ç†æƒ³ä¸ OPAC 的人士之一。他在 5月時接å—了 Meredith Farkas çš„ 專訪，談論 OPAC çš„å•é¡Œã€‚而令人矚目的是他所建立的 WPopac，這是一個以目å‰æœ€å—æ¡è¿Žçš„ Open Source blogging 軟體 WordPress 來架構館è—目錄。Bisson 在 WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed 這一篇有詳細的介紹。 [...]
[...] WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed « MaisonBisson.com What is WPopac? It’s an OPAC — a library catalog, for my readers outside libraries — inside the framework of WordPress, the hugely popular blog management application. [...]
[...] du web 2.0. Il s’agirait de combiner différents éléments dont le Wordpress Opac (WPopac) de Casey Bisson et les dispositifs mis en place par Michel Fingerhut sur L’Oeil de la [...]
[...] Casey Bisson’s WPopac (using WordPress blogging software) - http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11133/ [...]
Wow! This WOPac is really, really cool. I have a specific question, though… how are you handling the comments? My staff will want to know, when they get around to looking at it, how that’s restricted. I tried entering a couple of comments myself (medieval food books) and note that they don’t come up immediately (good idea!). I assume that the comments are hidden by default and someone has to go through and turn them on?
Thanks for putting together this project– it’s really exciting.
[...] WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed « MaisonBisson.com On Using WordPress to build library catalog. Wpopac is an open-source project that won a prestigious award from the Mellon Foundation. (tags: via:jamesgovernor open-source WordPress library2.0) [...]
@Jennifer Heise:
Comments are handled by WordPress, so there’s a rich set of options about what to do with them.
You might be interested in seeing another site built on Scriblio (was WPopac): beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu. It’s a collection of photos from our archives (we’re adding more photos every day), and members of the community are commenting with what they know about them.
[...] 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 Endeca-based OPAC. And [...]
[...] can learn more about this project and how it came about at maisonbisson. Bisson is also behind the Beyond Brown Paper project which is also based on [...]
[...] un OPAC et la plateforme de blogging WordPress qui utilise aussi Amazon pour les images : “WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed” que l’on peut voir en action à la Lamson [...]
[...] for fun or work (installation walkthroughs), tying in with RSS for project management, or tying in with library catalogs to autogenerate a (commentable, taggable) blog entry per book). One audience member said it reminded him of how [...]
[...] can learn more about this project and how it came about at maisonbisson. Bisson is also behind the Cook Memorial Library project which is also based on [...]
Great idea. Just wondering how far along with your project you are, what the program is currently capable of, how exactly you are making it run, etc.
[...] asked for a new name when I announced it, and early this year the Plymouth State University executive cabinet officially renamed WPopac as [...]
[...] plugin para o wordpress desenvolvido chamava-se WPopac, mas agora é o [...]
[...] versione multiutente (multibiblioteca) di Scriblio da integrare con OpenLibrary.org: scriblio (ex WPOPAC, in italiano recensito da The Geek Librarian) è un OPAC basato su wordpress ed è stato pensato [...]
[...] on a blog Lamson Library (created by Casey Bisson) - enables tagging, comments, trackbacks, [...]
[...] clipped from maisonbisson.com [...]
[...] can read more about Scriblio and how it got started. The beta of this site went public at the beginning of the summer, and work was (mostly) completed [...]
[...] more than two years after I realized how (really) bad the problem was and about 18 months after I prototyped my solution, our new library website, catalog, and knowledgebase launched last week — just in time for [...]
[...] developed Open Source Library Management Systems like Koha and Evergreen. People like John Blyberg, Casey Bisson and Dave Pattern are tweaking existing software to perform in ways that are better than the vendors [...]
[...] Elnézést, de mindig bepörgök, ha nextgen OPAC-ról és/vagy WP-rÅ‘l van szó… Casey-nek meg full riszpekt (meg persze munkatársainak, Jessamyn West-nek és Lichen Rancourt-nek is, de mégiscsak Casey találta ki az egészet…). [...]
Hey, I’d really like to get some of the source code from your catalog — I want to develop something similar. E-mail me?
@tl:
WPopac has been renamed Scriblio. More information about the project, including the source code is at about.Scriblio.net.
[...] 1½ års tid siden demonstrerede Casey Bisson med WPopac, hvordan man kan skrue Wordpress sammen omkring biblioteksbasen, så man får [...]
[...] on exsiting library catalogues to offer search features that are more user friendly. He calls it WPopac, which he admits is a bad name, but which has some neat ideas. Unfortunately I couldn’t get [...]
How about WebPac? Much easier to say than WPopac…
[...] plugin para o wordpress desenvolvido chamava-se WPopac, mas agora é o [...]
[...] Margaix, dentro del grupo de diferentes modelos existentes de Opac social, antes conocida como WPopac, y desarrollada por la Plymouth State University y patrocinada por Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, [...]
[...] Some of you may remember WPopac, a proof of concept project from Casey Bisson. He wanted to see if it would be possible to run [...]
[...] (formerly WPopac) is an award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features [...]
along to actually height. A huge huge tree We need I didn’t chunk in a hollow living the forests
[...] You can read Casey Bisson’s 2006 description of Scriblio (then called WPopac ie: WordPress Opac) here. [...]
[...] Margaix, dentro del grupo de diferentes modelos existentes de Opac social, antes conocida como WPopac, y desarrollada por la Plymouth State University y patrocinada por Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, [...]