social OPAC roundup
Speaking of social OPACs, I came across MIT Libraries’ The Virtual Browsery (Beta) via del.icio.us/jaydatema. It appears to be another OPAC/WordPress mashup, but not yet with as many records as the WPopac from Plymouth State’s Lamson Library.
Other social OPACs include Hennepin County Library’s catalog which allows for patron reviews, having reviews from Amazon.com load in the record, and RSS feeds for the reviews. Towards the beginning of the year John Blyberg showed everyone the AADL’s virtual card catalog. There’s also PennTags, which allows students to bookmark records in the Penn Library catalog, as well as PDFs, and websites. Am I missing any others?
I’m happy to see the project from MIT Libraries and hope more projects pop up. Due to ILS limitations it takes some serious coding to make anything like this happen, and since coding isn’t part of LIS programs, only libraries with enough resources to have coders on staff can approach these projects.
18 Nov 06 :: 9:36:20 pm
[…] Aaron Schmidt of walking paper dreams about the possibilities if library OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues) moving into the social networking realm. He cites the example of a Flickr group called NAME THAT FILM, where members post screenshots of movies and other members would try to guess what film it comes from by tagging that photo. He feels that if OPACs become social, then it would interesting to see what sort of games our readers might come up with similar to the Flickr one. I’m curious as to what readers would tag the books that they have read if tagging is possible. Currently, there are already some libraries that have OPACs that have a social networking element. And I’m sure there’ll be many more in the next couple of years when libraries become more Library 2.0. […]
19 Nov 06 :: 7:37:48 am
So, are we going with Sopac, or what?
19 Nov 06 :: 10:16:15 am
I like it!!
28 Nov 06 :: 6:39:36 pm
[…] Avec un peu de retard, je relaye ce post listant un certain nombre d’OPACs sociaux en cours : […]
19 Dec 06 :: 11:35:25 am
Thanks for looking at us–the Virtual Browsery was created by a small Task Force of the Humanities Library staff. We were lucky to have a Circulation Staff member with coding skills and talent.