Thursday, April 24, 2008

Kudos to Scriblio and thoughts

Scriblio is a fantastic Wordpress module that makes it easy to build a discovery layer over your regular library catalog (or to make a completely new one). It is completely free and built by folks how care about libraries and users: Casey Bisson, Lichen Rancourt and Jessamyn West.

It seems to me that there are different people hacking away at OPACs--trying to mine & mash them and teach them new tricks. Efforts like Scriblio, LibraryThing for Libraries, John Blyberg's Drupal-based AADL.org, Library Elf, and more.

I think we can reach some sort of synergy if we, at lease, share some code =)

Just counting the different implementations for "getting stuff out of a Millennium WebOpac record", I can count 3 (Scriblio's, AADL.org's and mine)... and they´re all PHP. And I can tell you I didn't use code from any of them (at the time I started I think Scriblio only had MARC import capabilities. Darn!)

With the Berkeley Accord, there might also be some standards, to boot. =)

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