Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

October 27, 2006 – 4:17 pm

MAIUG 2006 Philadelphia: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (interactive QuickTime with links or static PDF)
Web 2.0 and other ?2.0? monikers have become loaded terms. 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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (2)



It’s Official

July 23, 2006 – 3:56 pm

WPopac, a project I started on my nights and weekends, is now officially one of my day-job projects too.
We’ve been using our WPopac-based catalog as a prototype since February 2006, but the change not only allocates a portion of my work time specifically to the development of the project, but also reflects the library’s decision [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (9)

NELINET 2006 IT Conference Proposal

July 17, 2006 – 12:40 pm

I recently submitted my proposal for the 2006 NELINET Information Technology Conference.
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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (5)

Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

May 21, 2006 – 10:38 am

IUG 2006 presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (also available as a PDF with space for notes)

This is an update of my ALA Midwinter presentation.

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (10)

WPopac Gets Googled

May 4, 2006 – 11:50 am

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, [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (6)



Boolean Searching in WPopac

April 25, 2006 – 12:35 pm

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:

+
A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each result returned. 
-
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (1)

WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed

February 9, 2006 – 11:54 pm

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (90)

Data Visualization and the OPAC

January 21, 2006 – 8:06 am

A chat with Ryan Eby, also an Edward Tufte fan, elicited this line about another reason we continue to struggle with the design of our catalogs:
data isn’t usable by itself
if it was then the OPAC would just be marc displays
And yesterday I was speaking with Corey Seeman about how to measure and use ?popularity? information [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (3)

Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

January 20, 2006 – 1:30 pm

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (37)

OpenSearch Spec Updated

December 13, 2005 – 12:39 pm

I just received this email from the A9 OpenSearch team:
We have just released OpenSearch 1.1 Draft 2. We hope to declare it the final version shortly, and it is already supported by A9.com. Uprading from a previous version should only take a few minutes…
OpenSearch 1.1 allows you to specify search results in HTML, Atom, or [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (4)

OPAC Web Services Should Be Like Amazon Web Services

November 30, 2005 – 3:25 pm

No, I’m not talking about the interface our users see in the web browser — there’s enough argument about that — I’m talking about web services, the technologies that form much of the infrastructure for Web 2.0.
Once upon a time, the technology that displayed a set of data, let’s say catalog records, was inextricably [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (6)

Raging Arguments About The Future Of The ILS

November 27, 2005 – 10:29 am

I hadn’t seen Ryan Eby’s post at LibDev that connected ILSs with WordPress before I posted that library catalogs should be like WordPress here. It connects with a my comment on a post at Meredith Farkas’ Information Wants To Be Free. My comment there goes in two directions, but I’d like to focus on the [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (12)

Library Catalogs Should Be Like WordPress

November 26, 2005 – 10:32 am

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 [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (8)

Pew Internet Report: Search Engines Gain Ground

November 23, 2005 – 12:53 pm

According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:
On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.
Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (10)

More NEASIS&T Buy Hack or Build Followup

November 18, 2005 – 6:20 pm

First, Josh Porter, the first speaker of the day has a blog where he’s posted his presentation notes and some key points. Josh spoke about Web 2.0, and ended with the conclusion that successful online technologies are those that best model user behavior. ?I think Web 2.0 is about modeling something that already exists in [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (0)