Where Libraries are going
Feb 8th, 2006 by Karen
I just refound a post of Jenny’s on ALA TechSource entitled “Library 2.0 and the Real World” that talks about how Library 2.0 is manifesting itself in the example of NCSU’s new catalog and Casey Bisson’s work. I’ve talked about Casey’s work before and am thrilled to see it getting a lot of press. There is also interesting stuff going on with Georgia’s Evergreen project which is thinking about how to create an ILS capable of exposing bibliographic data.
All of this has me very jazzed about the possibilties. Particularly Casey’s work because we are also an Innovative site and should be able to capitalize and build on what he’s done. Whether or nor we do and when is up for debate, I was told point blank the OPAC is part of the ILS and NOT part of my job. It seems some of the people I work with are dead set on are making what Jenny, Casey and I see as fundamental mistake librarians make: assuming that the OPAC has to be part of the Integrated Library System (ILS). In my opinion to not treat the OPAC and the content therein as an essential and integral part of the library’s website it is like Amazon separating out the product search from their site’s content.
However, the same can be said of library databases. Just the other day someone pointed out to me A9’s OpenSearch. I’d heard something about this before but it really hadn’t made it on my radar screen yet. According to the A9 website:
OpenSearch is a set of simple formats for the sharing of search results. Any website that has a search feature can make their results available in OpenSearch™ format. Other tools can then read those search results. For example, here is an aggregator that brings together search results from many websites
Okay isn’t this really similar to what libraries are trying to accomplish with federated search, except that when libraries use a federated search tool they get results back in some potentially crappy vendor interface that is only so customizable. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could read search results from our library database and bring the results back as part of the libraries site? Libraries could then enhance the retrieved results with other data and allow users to manipulate the results in different ways. This is just the sort of service that future libraries should be offering.
[...] Where libraries are going - In this post, from February 8, 2006, the author argues that many people buy into the “fundamental mistake librarians make: assuming that the OPAC has to be part of the Integrated Library System (ILS). In my opinion to not treat the OPAC and the content therein as an essential and integral part of the library’s website it is like Amazon separating out the product search from their site’s content.” [...]