Karen Schneider is a Research and Development Consultant for the College Center for Library Automation in Florida. Her presentation was originally titled, The OPAC Sucks but has been changed to: Where We Stand, Late.
Schneider, in her presentation tells us why the OPAC sucks. In the past, OPACs have been enhanced with more library centered features, and not user-friendly features. This is what librarians asked for and this is what the vendors gave us. To really develop a good OPAC there are things we need to be aware about searching for materials. For one thing, most people make typos some of the time. A misspelling will not yield any search results. Today’s searches are two, three, or four words, and we aren’t talking about Boolean operators. Users’ searches are hesitant and are random discovery processes. People today are starting their searched elsewhere, like Google and Amazon. No one is using the help screens or the advance searches. Over all, users want to like your software, but libraries just aren’t providing that right now.
Last-gen OPACs are very poor at known item searches. They are weak when it comes to discovery searching and are pretty bad at user engagement. It is very hard to add digital content smoothly into these OPACs. These have become walled gardens, or silos, that you can’t branch out of or get into. This is very out of sync with the users’ expectation, and lacks emotional connection. It is necessary to provide better OPACs with features that meet the users’ expectations. Some new enhancements in better OPACs that are happening now are ranking, spell check, search as a box, and improved digital content. Other options that people are adding to make the OPAC better are: faceting, editions, working lists, review/rate features, persistent links, unified search and best bets.
Schneider gives four approaches to bettering libraries OPACs: Libraries can ditch the vendor’s OPAC and add a separate product onto their ILS. They can migrate to a whole new ILS with next gen features. Old OPAC can be replaced with a unified finding aid. Or they can just wait around for the vendors to catch up. The new concepts for these next gen OPACs are decoupled modules, user center designs, making the ILS a middle ware, union catalogs, leveraging other people’s data and data models, and using the open source.
Schneider talks about the values of open source software. Open source software actually fosters better vendor competition, and provides a healthier service. Because of the open source communities, actual fixes happen, and happen at a relatively fast rate. It disrupts the ILS market in a way that benefits the consumer
There are some problems we need to fix and some changes we need to make. There is a ranking problem, and with the surrogate record environment is hard to get ranking working well, but you should try. The surrogate record: a database record stands in for the object. In the digital world, there is no record, just the actual digital resource.
Should the ILS be a suite of tools for maintaining the collection with a different OPAC on top? There are issues with decoupling. Eventually all the applications will need to hook up. Decoupling increases maintenance at the library level. All this can leave to a scramble to develop interoperability standards that meet realistic needs.
Schneider concludes with some hard problems to solve before everyone can move to next gen OPACs. The current systems have aging, legacy data structures. The core taxonomy of the OPACs are complex and extensive. We still have record based data and need to think about record vs. content. What really needs to happen is libraries need to get in the mind of the user experience and develop from there.
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