Library 2.0 Websites

Back in March John Blyberg had a fabulous post entitled “Library 2.0 Websites: Where to begin?” that made my month. This post has been a touchstone for me all spring, because it is extremely relevant to things that I am working on right now. First, we are in the middle of building a content management system for MPOW and this post was very enlightening when thinking about that. Second, enhancing the library’s virtual presence has come up as a topic central in the MPOW strategic directions. I’ve been working on writing a summary of what that means for the library strategically and this post was a great jumping off point that mirrored much of what I’ve been thinking about.

Originally from blyberg.net

One of the best things about the post though is the fabulous graphic. I wish that I could come up with stuff like this to represent the ideas I’m talking about. I’m just not a visual person so it is often impossible for me to think of this kind of stuff. However, I will be using this graphic over and over again because it is SO good at conveying the issues.

The idea of Open Source Software, Social Software, Single Sign-on, Open Standards, and Integrated OPAC being the building blocks of a Library 2.0 website is very appealing and highly commendable. Personally, I think this framework provides a excellent place to start.

As a result, I’ve tried to incorporate these pieces into our site. In the process of rebuilding our site we’ve worked really hard to incorporate aspects of Social Software. We’ve brought up wiki and blog software and ultimately our content management system has aspects of wikis built into it. Where possible we’ve used Open Source Software, although we are building our own CMS and are likely to open source the code when we are done. Our redesign will be standards compliant.

Two pieces of the puzzle that we haven’t really started planning on how to incorporate are single sign-on and web services (as an open standard). We’ve done some internal experimenting with LDAP and Kerberos, but these projects have been only for Libraries staff use. Providing single sign-on for library users means having a single repository for authentication information. Currently, the catalog serves that purpose in a couple of instances: library account information and authentication of off-campus users.

The concept of the Integrated OPAC is also very important. However, I would go one step further and say what Libraries need is more than an Integrated OPAC, particularly in the academic library setting. For academic libraries, the OPAC is a very small piece of the search equation because it contains mainly books. Articles are as important in the academic library setting and the OPAC doesn’t search for these. So for the academic library what is needed is integrated search. Federated search capabilities integrated into the libraries website.

Please don’t misinterpret me and think that what I mean by this is federated search of all an academic libraries resources. This is not what I am proposing. Instead I would propose clustering resources by subject and federated searching them within subject pages. Subject specialists would choose what resources are included in the federated search for their subject. On the Library homepage, a more general set of resources would be included in federated search. It would also be nice to leverage federated search technologies to allow users to create their own sets of databases to be federated searched and then have new results delivered to the end user. Allowing users to comment and add other information on more than books is also desirable. If libraries could find a way to integrate their database resources with information in things like Cite U Like we could provide users with more useful and context specific information about library resources.