Scriblio 2.3 v4 is out. See it. Download it. Install it. Join the mail list.
What’s new?
Lots of small bug fixes.
Implemented wp_cache support.
Revamped SQL query logic for better memory efficiency.
New widget options.
Search suggest/autocomplete support (implemented in the new theme).
New theme. New Theme! By Jon Link.
(It’s old, but I just stumbled into it again…) Karen Calhoun’s report, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, included a lot of things I agree with, but it also touched something I’m a bit skeptical about: automated metadata production.
Some interviewees noted that today?s catalogs are put together mainly [...]
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 [...]
A bibliographic instruction quiz we used to use asked students how many of Dan Brown’s books could be found in our catalog. The idea was that attentive students would dutifully search by author for ?brown, dan,? get redirected to ?Brown, Dan 1964-,? and find three books. Indeed, the expected answer was ?three.?
As it turns out, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
