November 2006
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Day 18 Nov 06

Entries 2 Total

social OPAC roundup

Nov 18, ’06 7:52 PM

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.

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flickr game: name that movie, and social OPACs

Nov 18, ’06 2:32 PM

In Flickr I recently titled and tagged a photo of mine with the name of a movie. I clicked through to see what other photos were tagged with “videodrome” and found one that is part of a flickr group called NAME THAT FILM. Group members post screenshots of films (placing them in the group and tagging them with name that film. Other members attempt to figure out what film it’s from. Try it out!

This is fun stuff, but it is also slightly important. Flickr didn’t intend for people to play this game but it sprung up organically nevertheless. People are creative and will do neat things when they can interact with data on the web. Imagine if we could build something like this into our OPACs. Off the top of my head, what about having short passages listed (or letting people contribute them), the make the goal figuring out the book to which it belongs and posting a URL to the book’s OPAC record. Oh my! A game that would make people better at finding stuff in our collections.

I’m sure if our OPACs were social, people would come up with all sorts of games and most certainly interesting tags. Here are some tags I’d love to see:

  • stories to read on a stormy night
  • books i’m reading in high school
  • relaxing
  • you’ll hate this book
  • read by:username
  • not written by a dead white male
  • favorited by:username
  • chicago
  • High School Name: English 205
  • reluctant readers (clearly tagged by a librarian!)
  • CDs that changed my life
  • for:username

A guy can dream, can’t he?

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