Introduction

Hi all, my name is Jennifer Ward and I'm from the other UW - the University of Washington in Seattle. My official title at the UW Libraries is Head of Web Services, but like most of us I wear many different hats. Probably most relevant in the context of WiLS is that I am a member of our WorldCat Local pilot/implementation team, manage the Libraries' usability program, and am always on the lookout for ways to seamlessly integrate relevant library content and resources into the user's environment.

We were the first site to go live with WorldCat Local back in April of 2007. It's been a very positive experience for our users -- they no longer have to look in and navigate all of our discrete silos to find and get to resources. Of course, there's still a long way to go with working at the network level and making access truly seamless for our users, but the possibilities there are hugely exciting.

Introduction

Hello, my name is Van Carpenter and for 7 years I've been the Director of Library Services at Northland Baptist Bible College. Here at NBBC library we have experienced all of the challenges of a academic library servicing the needs of a small college. This will be my first foray into the face-to-face interaction of WiLS - so, I'm looking forward to it. The busyness in the field has kept me away far too long.

I'm very much interested in the topic of OPAC's and ILS's and, in particular, open source. We have had a Liblime Koha installation for at least two years, and we will soon be migrating to Liblime's Zoom ILS. We are interested in pushing the development cycle envelope and keeping the feature enhancement curve going. As a small college this can be difficult - even in OSS, but in a consortium this task becomes easier.

Fishing for Who, What, Which, When

Hi.
I'm Lauren Blough, the Automation Project Manager at South Central. My current interest in technological "discovery" is determining the total cost of ownership for the shiny new products and services. While software development scales new heights and services continue to evolve with more and more entrepreneurs applying their expertise, it's a challenge to integrate the pieces in a manageable local product/service. Costs are dividing into smaller and smaller units at higher and higher prices, some complicated by the switch from one-time fees to subscription models. Researching OPAC and open source topics is both exciting and mistifying when I try to figure out who has implemented what with which resources (does that statement accurately illustrate bewilderment?).

Use that Feed: Redux

Folks,

I think I blew the URL for the feed before, apparently some feed readers want to see "http://" rather than the original "feed://".  Go figure.  

So use that feed,... again. Put it into your favorite news reader like Google Reader or Bloglines and you'll always be up to date on the latest postings on the WiLSWorldCamp blog. Here's the feed URL:

http://wilsworldcamp.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Use it, don't abuse it. Be there or be square.

Later,

Mark

Replace, all or part?

Thanks for the question, Mark, on what gives--are we looking at replacing our whole ILS, or do we maintain our OPAC interface AND put up additional resource discovery interfaces such as WorldCat Local, VuFind, Primo, or Blacklight.

In reading over the posts to this blog, I am noticing two things that folks have mentioned. One is that their libraries are either in the process of replacing their ILS or looking to decouple their public library catalog interface and offer something completely new.

From my limited pointed of view, replacing the whole ILS is a long, slow, tedious process involving a lot of decision makers. Yet so much innovation is going on in user interfaces now. I'd hate to be stuck with my clunky Voyager interface for years longer while I wait for it to slowly upgrade, or wait for the whole RFP process to take place.

Some of my library patrons have told me "your library catalog is 10 years out of date." And "I can't find anything unless I know what I'm looking for." Frankly it isn't really true that the catalog is 10 years out of date. People forget how fast things have changed! But it sure seems like it when other interfaces around us like for Amazon and Google seem to be updating all the time and are so simple while our catalog is still using old search strategies. We've only last month implemented relevancy ranking in search results as the default, and this is only in one type of search--words anywhere. If you do a title search, it's still alpha order. And we still can't really do any sort of faceting of search results.

So for all of these reasons, I'm looking to make our public library catalog software something that runs far faster and is far easier to revise and update than what we have currently. And I don't want to wait. Long ago we used locally created interface software called NLS--it was decoupled from our ILS. Frankly with live linking out to grab the circulation status, I'm thinking decoupling our OPAC interface a better choice for library patrons now, given that there are far better indexing and web searching tools available than there were when we moved off the old NLS platform. By decoupling our catalog interface from our ILS, we'll be able to more quickly innovate and more quickly integrate journal article searching and other types of data with our catalog data. (Yes we have MetaLib and we can do metasearching, but in real-time it isn't quick. I'm really thinking pre-harvesting and indexing of various data feeds is a better solution for patrons in most cases.) Because if it's one thing I hear and see all the time, it's that people won't wait. If it's not fun to search and the results are overwhelming, they soon leave.

And besides, I think my co-worker Steve Meyer, and other library bloggers whose names I am not currently remembering have a good point that it's time to make software much faster than we've been able to in the past. It's time to actually control the interface our public sees. And maybe we'll learn something about indexing in the process.

Questions for the Camp to Talk About

Folks,

So what questions do you want answered at the camp?  Here's one from me:

How come it seems like if I want a super cool next gen OPAC, I have to run my current old ILS and also run one or more special extra cool add on thingies on top of it?  Huh what?  What if I only want to run one thingie and have it all?

Mark

Introduction

Hi, campers! My name is Nichole Fromm. This is my third or fourth WiLSWorld, but my first one wearing a WiLS "staff" ribbon on my nametag. I'm as interested in the OPAC as everyone here, so here are a couple lines about where I'm coming from...

When it comes to OPACs I'm afraid I'm easily distracted by shiny things, despite a background in and love for cataloging.

I'd rather satisfice than maximize. I'm a big fan of efficiency, yet I can fritter and tinker with the best of them.

Looking forward to this (hopefully) bug-free camping experience!