Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Video Tour of OPAC Discovery Layer Tools

The Disruptive Library Technology Jester posted (a while back!) the video for this presentation which demos OPACs from different libraries which are either: OPAC enhancements, OPAC wrappers or OPAC replacements.

It's a good watch.

http://dltj.org/article/discovery-layer-video-tour/

To me, some lessons are:
  • for user tags to be useful in an OPAC, you need critical mass, or seed the catalog with tags from an external source (LibraryThing?)
  • while there are a lot of similarities in the way the interfaces work, there are some things that *maybe* should be standardized; like the location of facets, labelling, etc. A research opportunity.
  • If I had to pick an [open source] discovery layer from those presented, I'd have to say Scriblio; it just seems solid, everything looks dead simple and keeps you clicking. One thing I'd change is the facet layout, as they seem rather "mashed together"--whitespace to the rescue?

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