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 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.

note: this is an update of my IUG2006 presentation.

Mid-atlantic innovative users group, iii, lib 2.0, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalog, maiug, maiug2006, online catalog, opac, opac 2.0, presentation, web 2.0, web opac, wpopac

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 to transition to WPopac as a our primary web OPAC.

Work to make a general release of the WPopac software available for download and use by any library (or anybody who wants to present structured data with faceted searching on the web) is in progress. And, as noted here, I’m also working with other libraries to bring WPopac-based catalogs online elsewhere.

In the meantime, I’m headed to WordCamp in San Francisco on August 5th, and the new WPopac blog has become the official source of news and information regarding the project.

lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalog, news, official, online catalog, opac, plymouth state university, wpopac

IUG 2006 presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0 (also available as a PDF 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.

note: this is an update of my ALA Midwinter presentation.

iii, innovative users group, iug, iug2006,lib 2.0, library, library 2.0, library catalog, online catalog, opac, opac 2.0, presentation, web opac, wpopac, libraries, web 2.0

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 not be present in any of the resuls that are returned.
   
• > <
  These two operators are used to change a word’s contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a result. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it.
   
• ( )
  Parentheses group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.
   
• ~
  A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word’s contribution to the result’s relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking “noise” words. A row containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the – operator.
   
• *
  The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator.
   
• “
  A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (‘”’) characters matches only results that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.
   

In short, it supports the quotes and plus/minus operators that people are familiar with in Google and others. The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use boolean operators:

• ‘apple banana‘
  Find records that contain at least one of the two words.
   
• ‘+apple +juice‘
  Find records that contain both words.
   
• ‘+apple macintosh‘
  Find records that contain the word “apple”, but rank records higher if they also contain “macintosh”.
   
• ‘+apple -macintosh‘
  Find records that contain the word “apple” but not “macintosh”.
   
• ‘+apple ~macintosh‘
  Find records that contain the word “apple”, but if the row also contains the word “macintosh”, rate it lower than if row does not. This is “softer” than a search for ‘+apple -macintosh’, for which the presence of “macintosh” causes the row not to be returned at all.
   
• ‘+apple +(>turnover ‘
  Find records that contain the words “apple” and “turnover”, or “apple” and “strudel” (in any order), but rank “apple turnover” higher than “apple strudel”.
   
• ‘apple*‘
  Find records that contain words such as “apple”, “apples”, “applesauce”, or “applet”.
   
• ‘“some words”‘
  Find records that contain the exact phrase “some words” (for example, rows that contain “some words of wisdom” but not “some noise words”).
   

Now I really need to configure my own version of MySQL without the over-reaching stopword list.

libraries, library, library catalog, online catalog, opac, wpopac

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.

ala, ala midwinter, ala midwinter 2006, iii, iug, lib 2.0, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalog, online catalog, opac, opac 2.0, presentation, web 2.0, web opac