Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Introduction

Hi,
I'm Janet White, librarian at Blackhawk Technical College. Out of frustration with our current OPAC, we have been investigating alternatives such as the Polaris System and AquaBrowser. But these systems are expensive for our small budget.
However, I was intrigued with an article a while back in NextSpace, the OCLC newsletter. It was an article by Tom Storey called Moving to the Network Level. He wrote, "Local OPACs have served a purpose but if I were designing an information discovery system today there would be no local catalog. OPACS represent a tremendous duplication of effort." Is this happening? It would be great to have a sophisticated searching system for all or part of one large union catalog.
I am hoping to find out more about what has been done to make searching library records a more user friendly process that is afordable.

1 comment:

Stephen Elfstrand said...

OCLC WorldCat Local might be an answer to this in the sense that it only uses the local opac for availability information. Of course the down side si that it doesn't retrieve on local changes to the records and can't even display them but the displaying of local modifications is supposedly coming