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?
  

Faceted search prototype: FaceTag

Watch the video for the FaceTag demo interface. It looks like faceting done right....

http://www.facetag.org/download/facetag.swf

Metasearching @ ALA

Well, I´m back from the ALA conference in Washington, and there seems to be some progress to metasearch products; nothing revolutionary, but the interfaces are getting more attention oriented towards letting the users find what they need.

Faceting and clustering

Faceting is a "simple" grouping of data from the results, like say, grouping all results from a certain database, or for a certain publication date, or for a certain author. However, clustering actually goes deeper into