Searching the OPAC: The State of Play Peter Binkley Access 2007 Peter Binkley Access 2007

Areas of Functionality Clumping Ordering Exploiting Contributing Deploying

Prehistory antarcti.ca (1999) antarcti.ca screenshot: Peter MorvillePeter Morville

History 1 Andrew Pace: “Making minor changes t library catalog systems is like putting lipstick on a pig.” (LITA forum, Sept. 2005)‏ NCSU's Endeca OPAC (Jan. 2006)‏ WPOPAC (now called Scriblio; Casey Bisson, Feb. 2006)‏ Karen Schneider, “How OPACs Suck, parts 1-3) (Mar.-May 2006)‏ LibraryThing; XC (May 2006)‏

History 2 ILS vendors follow suit, led by Ex Libris with Primo (May 2006); Encore (III); EPS/Rooms (Sirsi/Dynix)‏ NGC4LIB listserv (June 2006)‏ NGC4LIB Evergreen (Georgia PINES; Sept. 2006)‏

History 3 Open source alternatives, notably Solr-basedSolr  Casey Durfee, "Open Source Endeca in 250 Lines or Less" (Code4Lib, Mar. 2007)‏"Open Source Endeca in 250 Lines or Less"  Erik Hatcher / Bess Sadler, BlackLight (UVA, Apr. 2007)‏BlackLight  Andrew Nagy, VUFind (July. 2007)‏VUFind

Clumping 1 Bringing like together with like, for navigation, comparison and selection Notably by faceting on metadata fields But also by means of tags and other extra- metadata Examples:  NCSU (Endeca)‏ NCSU (Endeca)‏  BlackLight BlackLight  Summa Summa

Clumping 2 Beyond faceting: automated FRBRizing On the fly, based on online services  xISBN (OCLC) (example)‏ xISBNexample  thingISBN (LibraryThing)‏ thingISBN Or systematically, based on algorithms applied to metadata  OCLC Office of Research OCLC Office of Research

Visualization Lists of facets can be processed into visual presentations as well as textual Literal: geographical subject headings  Example: Peel ProjectPeel Project Figurative: abstract visualizations of various types, e.g. AquabrowserAquabrowser

Ordering 1 Traditional OPACs default to last-in first-out NextGen OPACs provide relevance ranked results But... does TF/IDF work for bib records? Examples  U of Alberta U of Alberta  Vanderbilt (Primo test)‏ Vanderbilt (Primo test)‏

Ordering 2 Problem of relevance ranking: Libraries Australia solution (Dellitt and Boston 2007)‏Dellitt and Boston Matches in the title, author and subject fields, and those fields which describe the format, nature or form of the item, are more important than general matches within the record. 2. Matches in multiples of the above fields are more important than matches in just one of those fields. 3. Where there is one or more query terms, an exact match of the term (where what was typed in to the query box is exactly the same as what is in a field in the record) is much more important than a phrase match (where what was typed in to the query box matches exactly a part of what is in a field in the record), which is more important than a word match (where all the terms in a query box appear in the field, but not necessarily next to each other).... Example: Libraries AustraliaLibraries Australia

Exploiting Web 1.0 was the human-readable web; Web 2.0 is the machine-readable web Make bibliographic metadata actionable Examples  Export citations to e.g. RefWorksRefWorks  unAPI: embedded link to raw metadata unAPI  COinS: embedded “headless” OpenURL COinS Tools: e.g. Firefox extensions  LibX: toolbar provides customized links LibX  Zotero: citation manager Zotero

Contributing “User-generated content” Especially tags  Example: Tamworth, NH (Scriblio)‏Tamworth, NH LibraryThing for Libraries: import tags and recommendations LibraryThing for Libraries  Example: Danbury, CTDanbury, CT LibraryBiblioCommons approach (webcast):webcast  the fully social OPAC  aggregated as broadly as possible

Identity An added dimension to tagging: personal metadata is a potential source of facets, relevance Networks of trust OPAC is already an authenticated environment, but must interlock with other identity systems, e.g. courseware Shibboleth? OpenID?

Deploying New watchword: “Place our resources where our users live.” I.E. courseware, Facebook, browser plugins (e.g. LibX), etc., VREFacebook Interfaces: SRU, OpenSearch allow mashups – even OAI-PMH?SRUOpenSearchOAI-PMH Shall we pursue them as far as Second Life?Second Life

Issues and Obstacles Planning, determining specifications Metadata cleanup Back end processes

Planning and Specifying NCSU example: eight months With one technical librarian, supported by a team and by the vendor (Anstelman, Lynema, Pace, 2007)‏Anstelman, Lynema, Pace, 2007 Issues of scope: what goes in? Is this “only” a catalogue, or something else? Example:  WorldCat Local WorldCat Local

Metadata Cleanup Faceting exposes (bad) metadata  Example: BlackLightBlackLight Do you know how clean your data is?

Back End Processes Extracting bibliographic and holdings records Enhancing them with external metadata Processing and Indexing Maintaining synchronization in real time (NCSU: 1.7 million records, updated nightly; BlackLight: 3.8 million, similar)‏ Circulation status... (NCSU: nightly)‏

Services on the Grid Alternative approach: scoped view of union catalogue e.g. WorldCat Local, or Talis Library PlatformTalis Library Platform Or Google? Advantage: broader aggregation of content Disadvantage: complexity of including local holdings-level metadata, integration with local systems

Special Collections Benefits of providing access to collections with special needs  e.g. Umlaut: special handling of technical reports  e.g. Blacklight: faceting of musical instruments Escape from one-size-fits-all approach of OPAC

Imperative Users do not like our interfaces They do not use our advanced search features They do not get the full benefit from our collections We will only be left further and further behind

But... What if we solve the discovery problem for OPAC-contents, but it doesn't work for the rest of our users' citation-space? Integration with metasearch? OpenURL resolvers? (Umlaut)‏

Continuity The technological opportunities change The service imperatives do not Traditional core values and methods of librarianship will see us through

Searching the OPAC: The State of Play Peter Binkley Access 2007 Peter Binkley Access 2007