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

Following Edward Tufte’s advice, I’ve been wanting to offer a presentation without slides for a long time now; I finally got my chance in Portland. The downside is that now I don’t have anything to offer as a takeaway memory aid for my talk. My speaking notes are too abstract to offer for public consumption, but below are the URLs from them along with a tiny bit of context.

Foundation

Increasing use of the web is changing our expectations of information services and places greater demands of self-service on them. If “Web 2.0” has any meaning, it’s this notion that internet services are no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a part of our every day reality.

One interesting reflection of this increasing usage and comfort with the web is the development of social software like MySpace, Facebook, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, Flickr, and also LibraryThing.

It takes a moment, sometimes, to realize what’s changed in the ten years since the first Mosaic browser opened the web to a mass audience. Kevin Kelly tried to explain that when he noted: “The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.”

Okay, now what?

We need to understand how people now search for and interact with information. Part of that means making peace with search engines and making sense of “findability.” Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability addresses this question in terms directly relevant to libraries. To that I add the notion of The Google Economy and a set of rules for participation (and findability) in it:

• Linking must be possible
• Linking must be desirable
• Linking must be measurable

I argue that libraries are rich with the stuff people would like to link to, but the architecture of our systems often fails us on the other aspects.

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 hit. Elsewhere, WPopac content is appearing in blogs (examples: Fuzzyfruit and Angie) and as a result some of the books in WPopac are now highly ranked in web search engines (example: A Baby Sister For Frances is now the only non-commercial result in the first page of Google results).

A rather more controversial look into how the Google Economy works can be found in Google’s explanation of their search results. Interestingly, the same factors within the Google Economy that created the controversy also made possible a solution: the top search result for “Jew” is now the Wikipedia page.

How can we track our participation in the Google Economy?

Alexa might be best described as the Nielsen ratings for the web. Tracking the daily changes in reach and rank (and looking at all the variations of the graph) can be rather addictive. Alexaholic serves that fix by offering more varied views of the same data.

It should be said, however, that the results in Alexa are the slowest to reflect changes or improvement in a service’s role in the Google Economy. A more immediate pulse of things can be taken at Technorati or within Google.

Last word

As we consider ways to improve our online services — as we look to build the online library of the near future — these words echo in my mind:

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

• They want/need information
• They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
• They want/need to be entertained.

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems. Have I said that phrase enough?

In short, our libraries’ web sites are the online embodiment of our libraries. Our patrons don’t want to know how to use our library, they want to find in our online services the value that libraries offer in their in-person services. They want online services that deliver answers.

findability, future libraries, google economy, lib 2.0, libraries, library, library 2.0, online libraries, opac 2.0, presentation, usability, web, web 2.0, 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

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.

library, libraries, library 2.0, lib20, opac 2.0, opac, library catalog, library services, wordpress, wpopac, future libraries

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 about catalog items. It got me thinking about Flickr’s interestingness metric, which seems to combine the number of times a photo has been “favorited,” viewed, and commented. In a related fashion, I’ve been looking at ways to track the terms people use to find catalog items and use those to help improve search results. A basic form of this is in the OPAC prototype I demonstrated yesterday.

And all of this has me looking forward to Aaron Krowne’s Quality Metrics presentation at code4lib.

library, libraries, opac 2.0, library catalog, popularity, search ranking, data visualization, ryan eby, corey seeman, metrics, search rank, opac, library 2.0

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