This discussion was initially centered around easy things that can be done to enhance the OPAC. Nothing as drastic as the AADL redesign but still provide better services to patrons. The discussion ended up going all over the place and I managed not to take notes but here is what little I remember.

  • No one is happy. Improving the OPAC is on the minds of everyone in the room and none think they've reached a happy ending. As with any website/service there likely won't be an endpoint and the service will constantly evolve. Still it would be nice to be at least in the present.
  • As with any discussion on OPACs, vendors were spoken unhighly of. More customization and data access (api's, etc) were high on the list.
  • I recommended people check out the Lipstick on a Pig presentation from Code4lib2006 for some ideas of what to include.
  • Use external data. Amazon provides plenty of useful information that could be added to the catalog. May need to link back but some libraries already do with affiliate links to help funds. Win-Win.
  • Possibilities for simple inclusion is iframes or javascript. Both have set-backs.
  • Libraries need to share their code. Code4lib and others are currently doing this. More could be done. Blyberg has mentioned a central code repository in the past. There's also OSS4Lib. More collaboration is needed.
  • What about libraries that can't afford a full-time tech for implementation? I mentioned something like LibLime. Many problems involved. Will write more about this in a future post.
  • Services such as Penn-Tags were again mentioned.
  • Not sure what the future might be. Can't tell if Talis is stating that ILS should have an API or if the future is a centralized API service (no local ILS) where individual libraries build their local face based on the data-stream. Neither idea was a clear winner.
  • Make things reusable. RSS, OpenSearch and other interfaces help bring holdings to where the people are.
  • More useful data. Again most OPACs help you if you know what you want. If you don't it's very hard to make decisions based on what's there.