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Juice Your OPAC

Richard Wallace’s Juice project (Javascript User Interface Componentised Extensions) is a “simple componentised framework constructed in Javascript to enable the sharing of Ajax Stye extensions to a web interface.”

WordPress or Scriblio users might do well to think about it as a way to put widgets on systems that don’t support widgets, though as Richard points out, “the framework is applicable to any environment which, via identifiers contained within a html page, needs to link to or embed external resources.”

Scriblio 2.3 v4 Released

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. » about 100 words

Is Automated Metadata Production Really The Answer?

(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 […] » about 300 words

Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

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 […] » about 400 words

Cataloging Errors

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, my library has all four of Dan Brown’s published books, including the missing Digital Fortress. The problem is that three books are cataloged under the more common Brown, Dan 1964-, but Fortress was cataloged under Brown, Danielle.

The problem is that cataloging is imperfect.

Yeah, it takes some marbles to say that, but the fact is that cataloging is a human endeavor. Humans make mistakes. The challenge we face is to build systems that tolerate error, and then make it easy to fix those errors when discovered.

It’s Official

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 […] » about 200 words

NELINET 2006 IT Conference Proposal

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 […] » about 300 words

Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0

| <a href="http://www.innopacusers.org/iug2006/">IUG 2006 presentation</a>: <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/misterbisson/Presentations/IUG-2006May21.mov">Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0</a> (also <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/misterbisson/Presentations/IUG-2006May21.pdf">available as a PDF</a> with space for notes) This is an update of <a href="http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11096/">my ALA Midwinter presentation</a>. » about 400 words

WPopac Gets Googled

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 […] » about 800 words

Boolean Searching in WPopac

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 […] » about 500 words

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, […] » about 1000 words

Data Visualization and the OPAC

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.

Presentation: Designing an OPAC for Web 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, […] » about 400 words

OpenSearch Spec Updated

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 any other format (or multiple formats) in addition to just RSS. In addition, OpenSearch 1.1 will be supported by Internet Explorer 7, among other software, so we strongly recommend that you upgrade. Also new is the ability to specify suggested searches, such as spelling suggestions and related queries. (link and emphasis addded)

Woot! I’ll be doing something with this soon.

Raging Arguments About The Future Of The ILS

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 technology side now.

Our vendors will inevitably bend to our demands and add small features here and there, but even after that, we’ll still be stuck paying enormous amounts of money for systems that remain fundamentally flawed. Technology marches on, and inevitably we’ll find some new way to use our catalog data. John Blyberg is talking about this in his ILS customer bill of rights post, and that’s what I was getting at when I say the catalog should be like WordPress.

Meredith asks for more programmers, but as a programmer, I’m asking for her help in demanding smart software design from our vendors.

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.

Pew Internet Report: Search Engines Gain Ground

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 […] » about 100 words

More NEASIS&T Buy Hack or Build Followup

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 our offline worlds, mostly in the spoken words and minds of humankind.”

Interestingly, in findability terms, it was Josh’s post that clued me in that the event podcast was online because he linked to my blog in his post. Lesson: links make things findable.

Like Josh, I found my voice a little unfamiliar, but you can listen here (51MB) if that’s your thing.

Also, I demoed some features I’d like to see in a future OPAC, but to help people visualize them, I finally put together a graphical mockup of them here.

NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference

I’m here at the NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference at the College of the Holy Cross today. The conference is titled “Google vs. the OPAC: the challenge is on!” and there’s quite a lineup of speakers. My presentation is on “the social life of metadata.” My slides are online, and below is some background. The Library […] » about 400 words

NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build Followup

I was tempted to speak without slides yesterday, and I must offer my apologies to anybody trying to read them now, as I’m not sure how the slides make sense without the context of my speech. On that point, it’s worth knowing that Lichen did an outstanding job liveblogging the event, despite struggling with a […] » about 600 words

NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build

I’m here at the NEASIS&T Buy, Hack or Build event today at MIT’s Media Lab. On the list are Joshua Porter, Director of Web Development for User Interface Engineering, Pete Bell [corrected], co-founder of Endeca Solutions, and me.

I’m posting my slides here now, but I’m told we’ll see a podcast of the proceedings soon after the conclusion. Be aware that the slides are full of links. I won’t be able to explore them all during the presentation, but they might add value later.

Library-Related Geekery

Ryan beat me to reporting on the interesting new services at the Ockham Network (noted in this Web4lib post). The easiest one to grok is this spelling service, but there are others that are cooler. He also alerted me to a Perl script to proxy Z39.50 to RSS. Though for those more into PHP (like […] » about 300 words

Put A Pepper In Your Library

Libraries are known for books. And despite the constant march of technology, despite the fact that we can put a bazillion songs in our pocket, despite the availability of the New York Times and so many other newspapers and thousands of journals online, books are a big part of what libraries are. Books, dead tree […] » about 600 words

The High Cost Of Metasearch For Libraries

I’ve been looking seriously at metasearch/federated search products for libraries recently. After a lot of reading and a few demos I’ve got some complaints. I’m surprised how vendors, even now, devote so much time demonstrating patron features that are neither used nor appreciated by any patrons without an MLS. Recent lessons (one, two, three) should […] » about 500 words

LibDev Launched

LibDev launched today. From the Welcome message there: LibDev is a site for those interested in libraries and networked information. Want to find a way to apply tags or social bookmarking to library content? Interested in how Wikipedia can serve libraries? Want to find a better way to do patron loads or talk about what […] » about 200 words