Next Generation OPACs

Casey Bisson from Plymouth State University recently was awarded the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for creating a blog based OPAC known as WPOPAC (for Word Press OPAC).

You can search the WPOPAC here. You will see that each record is blog page that includes reviews from Amazon and potentially comments from patrons. It also includes cover art and other more traditional catalog features such as subject and author links.

Another OPAC that is currently being discussed is the Koha open sourced ILS' OPAC. See what I think is a good looking example here. This OPAC looks more like our OPAC but includes a "refine your search" column, RSS feeds for searches that notify you when new books arrive on a topic or in a call number range, and Amazon cover art and reviews. I also think their MARC view is nifty. Apparently Koha is very customizable and this is just one flavor of it.

Finally, FYI Amy Ostrom posted a laundry list of what she would like in a future OPAC to the NGC4LIB (Next Generation Catalog for Libraries) listserve. This list has sparked quite a conversation and has now been posted here. It is on the bottom of this wiki page.