The Lone OPAC

The various discussions here about portal integration and services, along with a lengthy discussion on Web4Lib on the role of the OPAC has had me thinking. Is it a good thing to even have people using the OPAC alone? Would it be better to have people accessing a portal or other “meta-site” instead?

I really like some of the recent public library redesigns and enhancements. AAPL has a nice integration with Drupal that lets them push many services right along side the OPAC and SPL has their catalog offer related databases.

I think this is something that could be very worthwhile for academic libraries, especially ones centered around research. The OPAC by itself is far from a worthwhile research tool. As others have stated here its really just an Inventory Management System. Coupled with everything else the library offers, however, I think the beginnings of a good tool could be created. This is in essence what I talked about in my last post except now I’m thinking it might be worthwhile to bring everything in one place.

You can think of this set-up as an information/research portal. Many academic libraries already have subject guides that point out related databases and the like. I think this could be taken a step further and have a portal with these subjects as areas/pages and develop the guide more. Put a search box to search the collection or even better, a meta-search of related sources. But then also list some suggested databases (common in guides) and perhaps common queries or hot topics. Then really go the next step and maybe syndicate some headlines from related journals or even news sites. Perhaps even popular citations from CiteULike and similar services. This has the benefit of pushing your services, showing your related holdings and helping people get started on research. With tools like David Walker’s RSS Creator, the amount of information that can be offered is increasing. Something like this would have to be carefully created though, if information overload is to be prevented. Hitting someone with 100 RSS feeds is probably worse then none.

As with my last post, what this comes down to is integration and a unified presence. There is a wealth of information provided but it’s mostly fragmented on many sites. Pushing relevant services wherever possible will become increasingly important I think. Is anyone working on anything like this? I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has “unified” their presence and what kind of difference it made for patrons.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,