stevejzoo

Page by Steve Johnson, librarian and archivist, including occasional writings, links to software, notes about organizations in which I participate, and matter elsewhere classified. Updated July 9, 2006.

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What to do until OPAC 2

Building or buying a new generation OPAC...a Web 2.0 / Library 2.0 application with social tagging and personalization and content easily sharable on the open internet via open application programming interfaces... is not immediately feasible for many libraries, saddled with legacy systems and small budgets. How can managers of these libraries respond to information seekers whose expectations are based on daily use of Amazon and Google? More specifically, how can we extend the reach of our OPAC to make its contents more accessible to potential library users? And how can we make the contents of the OPAC more compelling to our users, who spend more of their search time on the public internet?

For the small library I manage, the short term plan uses OCLC's Open WorldCat to extend the reach of the OPAC. To make the OPAC content stand out from what can be found on the public internet, I am turning to locally owned content not included in the OPAC.

The OCLC/Open WorldCat piece of this plan was the easiest to implement. In addition to membership in OCLC, prticipation in Open WorldCat requires only a current FirstSearch subscription. Our library holdings "set" in WorldCat are now discoverable via Google, Yahoo, and other internet search services. Just this summer, OCLC announced a new, public site which makes all of WorldCat accessible at www.worldcat.org.

To make the catalog content more compelling to users accustomed to searching the wide variety of information types discoverable on Google and Yahoo, I looked to locally produced citation and other databases currently excluded from the OPAC. With few exceptions, at my library, citations to individual articles are in databases separate from the OPAC. Library users, however, are accustomed to finding citations to articles in Google searches adjacent to citations to books (as well as to full text, of course).

The availability of Worldcat records for most, though not all, bird species represented in Birds of North America got me to thinking about other article level citations typically not included in the OPAC. These citations are discoverable via the search engines and it made sense to make those citations for readers who started at the OPAC. I soon realized it would made even more sense to add the following locally developed citation databases to the OPAC:

• Bibliography of 861 articles published in our scientific journal, Zoologica, between 1907 and 1974. (This will be even more valuable when our digitization of Zoologica is completed.)
• Names and subjects headings from the 450 files maintained in a traditional paper vertical file. (Although it would make sense to migrate public domain and locally owned content to digital format, most of the copyrights in the vertical file are owned by other organizations).
• Cumulative staff bibliography, perhaps winnowed down to include only articles available in the local library collection.

Each of these citation databases represents content not wholly searchable on the web, nor in WorldCat or any other database. That is content I can mention when talking about the scope and limitations of the OPAC as compared to everyone's search engines of choice.

Moving these databases from ProCite to Marc format will require some data editing and programming. The resulting content enhancement to our OPAC will have no relation relation to "version 2.0" of anything. My library's users, however, will find more results while looking in fewer places.

And that is what I will do until my library implements OPAC 2.

Steve Johnson

August 2006