All topics and comments have a permalink, please use it to reference conversations here. Feel free also to link and trackback to this site from yours.

An RSS feed of forum topics is available, and each topic has a separate feed for its comments.

Technorati Tags: conversations, forum, libdev, libraries, library, sig

Related items

• Welcome to LibDev
• XML Server and web services
• Who’s looking at portal integration?
• Getting Alternate ISBNs
• Extending Blyberg’s XMLOPAC Class

Right now, however, it is a bit difficult to do such a task. You can tweak templates but any large changes or integration often takes lots of hacks and is not very elegant. The usability of such a system could also decrease as you try to hack on this feature or that. This is important as more and more libraries begin to look into ways of making the OPAC easier to use and more importantly, information easier to find. A recent quote caught my eye and it may be useful to keep in mind when discussing features for you OPAC and how to implement them.

“Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It’s simple, it’s elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it’s got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open–and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful.” (via Column Two)

Since there are likely some google haters in the crowd here’s a better takeaway from the article:

In a 2002 poll, the Consumer Electronics Association discovered that 87% of people said ease of use is the most important thing when it comes to new technologies.

In the ramp up and discussion for “Library 2.0″ the feature list keeps getting longer and the ideas ever more complex. Can you keep you OPAC from becoming a confusing mess? Can you even implement these features if you wanted to? When someone visits your OPAC are they eased into what’s available or hit head on by the thousand options they have? Can they find a book without knowing boolean constructs?

All of these questions are important as people will demand these features but also demand that they not get in the way. Is there really a reason to have a button to show the MARC record front and center? Can you tell who the OPAC was designed for? With a good URL structure such things could be relegated to the background for advanced users. In WordPress if you put a /feed/ at the end on any URL you will get the feed for the item be it author, category, item (comments) or site. With a good architecture an OPAC could do similar things with /marc/ showing the MARC record, /feed/ giving the RSS/Atom, /xml/ giving the MARC XML or other XML syntax, etc. This allows you to expose what you want (add links on the page) or just leave it there for those “in the know” (librarians that want MARC). This is another area where WordPress gives a good example of how it can be done. And it’s extensible so if you wanted /dc/ to give you a Dublin-Core output of the page you could do so if you wanted. There’s already a WordPress blog that’s COins-PMH compliant, how long would it take you to make your OPAC as well (server-side)?

Does your OPAC allow you the flexibility to integrate, add/remove features or otherwise change as patron demand changes? Shouldn’t it?

Technorati Tags: ILS, libraries, OPAC, library2.0, users, wordpress

Related items

• Can you be trusted with Library 2.0?
• ILS Architecture: Open vs Turnkey
• LiveSearch and Clustered Displays
• OpenLibrary.org: Leveraging Digital Technologies to Provide Open, Universal Access to Books
• COinS-PMH and Microformats

• OCKHAM Alerting Service – simple search interface for OAI that includes html and rss output
• MyLibrary at OCKHAM – OAI search enhanced with thesaurus, related links, etc.
• OCKHAM Spell Web Service – simple REST interface to spelling suggestions in XML format

First, the alert service. For the developers here you will probably be interested in the PERL code they have available as much as the service itself. They include modules to harvest and index OAI data, handle SRU requests and parse CQL. The three modules can be downloaded from the site of CPAN. There’s sample searches listed but you can do your own search using the search box in the top left. What caught my eye was how simple the URL structure for the RSS links are. It would only require a few changes to the RSS file to be OpenSearch compliant. They would also need a description file but that is fairly trivial. The URL structure itself would need really no change. It would be nice to limit the results or paginate however, but this is on the list of to-do so should be coming. Also the RSS feed doesn’t seem to be sent with xml mime type so it doesn’t parse in my Firefox atleast.

Second is the My Library. All I can say is nice. I like the features and they should be in any OPAC. I actually had a similar working version for my III OPAC, at least the thesaurus one. I used WordNet in my own database and did some manipulations from there. The similar content feature is already in our OPAC as Related or something, though I’m unsure of how well it works.

This brings me to the Spell Webservice which I think will come in handy. Setting up WordNet in my database was a pain and then writing all the SQL was another. Having a webservice for a needed service like this will be a boon. I’m just surprised someone (like Google) hasn’t already done it.

Plenty of other things at the OCKHAM site to look at. Hopefully it will give some ideas for things people are doing. Unfortunately I have more ideas than time.

Related items

• OpenLibrary.org: Leveraging Digital Technologies to Provide Open, Universal Access to Books
• How to create a Firefox Search Plugin – OpenWorldCat
• Personalized Search
• The Lone OPAC
• COinS-PMH and Microformats

I recently posted here regarding standards and libraries, specifically the need for lightweight APIs/formats for use in various projects. I also mentioned an article over at darcus blog regarding light vs complex, and there is even a bet that lightweight will win over heavyweight. While that can be debated, there is definitely a place for lightweight implementations.

An example would be COinS or more specifically COinS-PMH. I have to take a second to admit that I’m playing catch-up here and probably don’t understand all the background and possibilities, but what I’ve seen I definitely like. There’s days I feel like there’s too much history with libraries to ever catch-up but hopefully I’m catching the important ones. For reference here are the applicable specs/overviews:

• OpenURL COinS: A Convention to Embed Bibliographic Metadata in HTML
• ContextObjects in Spans Protocol for Metadata Harvesting – ROGUE Spec

An over simplification is that COinS is a way of using OpenURLs within HTML and COinS-PMH is a simplified OAI-PMH protocol/set-up that allows the easy extraction of metadata regarding an object marked with COinS. In otherwords it turns an HTML page into a sort of simple repository. While this doesn’t seem that great the idea becomes more fruitful when it’s used at sites like CiteULike, journal pages, etc.

If you haven’t already looked into microformats, I recommend doing so. Microformats in the simplest term is standardized markup. You markup things with specific tags, class names, etc and this allows people to create parsers to extract the information. I’ve also written about this before at my blog. The power of this becomes apparent when more people adopt it. To quote Mark Pilgrim (who is writing some of the parsers for microformats):

Imagine having your own private database of every person you’ve ever stumbled across online, and being able to download their vCards into your address book. And every event, which you can download into iCal/Sunbird/Outlook. Plus a list of all the Creative Commons-licensed content you’ve ever read, which you can repurpose — legally, according to the terms of the license. Now imagine searching such a database. And subscribing to your search results as a syndicated feed.

Lets apply this idea to COinS-PMH. I’m doing some research and browsing sites like CiteULike, Journals, my library’s OPAC, etc. I have a greasemonkey script/bookmarklet that adds a button beside any citation that is marked up properly. When I hit the button it adds it to a datastore I set-up (or someone else did) that I can then search or browse later to find what I really want. Since I have actual metadata about the objects I can integrate links to ILL forms, EndNote, etc. While some of this is already possible (saving to endnote, OpenURL buttons, etc) this creates a standardized markup that allows it to be extended in anyway I see fit.

I see this having some potential and I look forward to seeing where it leads. Hopefully more scripts and examples become available. Until then you may wish to look at the following posts:

• COinS-PMH as Universal Content Clipboard
• COinS-PMH and WordPress pt. 2

Also, if your library is in the OCLC OpenURL Resolver Registry you can get a bookmarklet or greasemonkey script for use with your library that detects COinS. I found one for our library’s ILL request form. Pretty spiffy.

Related items

• OpenLibrary.org: Leveraging Digital Technologies to Provide Open, Universal Access to Books
• Hiding Complexity in Library 2.0
• ILS Architecture: Open vs Turnkey
• BBC Archive Catalogue
• OAI Repositories, RSS and SRU

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.

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

Related items

• NELINET 2006 IT Conference Proposal
• Search Engines, Durable URLs, Discussions, And Library Catalogs
• OpenLibrary.org: Leveraging Digital Technologies to Provide Open, Universal Access to Books
• Boolean Searching in WPopac
• Library Camp East