The Future of the OPACor

The Decline and Fall of the OPACor

Why Your OPAC Sucks

Fall From Grace• 1980’s: Top of the World, Ma!

80% favorable rating for OPAC*

• Today, when college students start information search89% Search Engine (62% Google)2% Library website**

• At FIU BBC Library 2005-2007 3-5% of reference computers in use display OPAC or library database

*Karen Markey. The Online Catalog: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained?, D-Lib Magazine, J/F 2007

**OCLC. Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources. 2005

Why Your OPAC Sucks

• Difficult to use• Irrelevancy• Access and delivery• Information all over the

place• Solitary experience• Thoroughly unpleasant to use

Difficult to use

• Complicated• Not intuitive• Not consistent with

user needs or behaviors

• http://youtube.com/watch?v=tKvR0OC4nYc

Irrelevancy

• Results not ranked by relevance

• Catalog works if you know what you want:

Author,TitleSubject Heading (hah!)

• Keyword searching tacked on• OPAC a bastardized inventory tool

Information all over the place

• Catalog, library databases a false dichotomy• Users expect all-in-one• FIU 350 databases / 50 interfaces• Over 85% of Users prefer a metasearch

(federated)• Over 60% of librarians think a federated

search is not a proper starting point**LITA National Forum. Adventures in Federated Metasearch Technology,

2005

Access and (Non-) Delivery

• Tied to print• Not one-stop shopping• Not like the web• Not what users expect• Chasm between

searching and getting

Please, Sir, I want some more full-text articles.

Solitary experience

• Web 2.0:the Internet gets social InteractiveCollaborativeContent creationUser plays active role

• But not the OPACNo interactionUser aloneTake what you getUser passive

Unless he’s on the OPAC…

Thoroughly unpleasant to use

• Jargon filled• Merciless (spelling)• Do it our way• OPAC as librarian cliché

AuthoritativeUnfriendlyUnapproachableNo talking, laughing, or fun allowed

How it Happened

• Librarians were adapting to one paradigm shift; got blindsided by anotherJust getting automation down, when the WWW arrived

• Nature of information changedcreationaccessorganization

How information changed

Scarce; expensive to gather Large repositories Institutionally oriented Mainly print Location (Catalogs, indexes)

Abundant and cheap Access anywhere, anytime Personally oriented Multimedia

Discovery (Google, Amazon)

Industrial Age, 1833-1992 Information Age, 1993-

1.0 Catalog in a 2.0 World

• Essentially an inventory tool• Designed to locate known items• Finds things in a given, local location• Separate databases for articles, books• Steep learning curve• Obsolete, eventually disregarded and

forgotten by users

How did we librarians react?

Tech services: Business as usual

• MARC 1960’s technology• Hierarchy of knowledge

Not understoodNot used

• Descriptive, local catalogingSlowExpensiveUnderutilizedNot sustainable

No, no, meeting names go in the 711 field!

Reference: Fix the User• Web meant people could find information on their own• Gave up on OPAC as complicated• Reference Librarians had a choice

Fix the OPAC, orTeach people to use it(Information Literacy)

• We guessed wrong• Turns out they don’t need it,

and don’t want to bother• The user isn’t broke; we are

Boola boola, boola boola,boola boola,Boolean!

So, what to do?

• Ironically, users told us what they wanted in the 1980’s

Simpler subject searchingSpell checkingRelevance rankingAdd searchable content (articles, tables of

contents, etc)Make classification system easier to use

OPAC of the near future

• 2-3 years• Radical changes for OPAC

1. Easy to use2. Interactive & fun3. One Stop Shopping

Easy to use as Amazon

• If it isn’t, you have a problem• Single, ubiquitous search box• Spell checking• Relevancy ranking• Faceting• Simple, clear, no classes needed

Single, ubiquitous search box

Spell Checking

Out of 911 hits for rich people, Relevant results are at the top

Welcome to Post-Boolean searching!

Relevance

Facets mine subject headings

Interactive and fun• Library 2.0• Tags• Reviews• Readers also liked…• Embedded

ask-a-librarian• Forums• Book covers• RSS feeds• Texting call numbers• Things you can’t imagine, but your users can

TagsDanbury Public Library, with tags from Librarything.com

ReviewsPierce County Library System, using Polaris

Readers also liked…Part of Amazon’s sophisticated Reader’s Advisory

Interactive and fun (cont.)

• Tapping enormous pool of talent and goodwill• Catalog as a social animal• It’s how the Web works

DecentralizedCollaborativeBest example of pure, political anarchy

• If a website isn’t easy and fun, we go to another one

LibraryThing: Books are fun!

One stop shopping

• Integration of article databases with catalog • Users see no distinctions between catalog,

article databases, and websites• Neither should we• One simple interface for everything• Maybe can’t get all databases in catalog, but

must get some with full-text

Articles and Books Together!Ex Libris’ Primo, Vanderbilt University

The OPAC can have full-text articles!

In the year, 2525…

• if man is still alive, if woman can survive, they may find…

• The library is not thecenter of the information universe

• The user is!

Geocentric/Aristotelian view:The local catalog is thesun

Heliocentric/Copernican view:The local catalogis a planet (Karen Calhoun,

Being a Librarian 2006)

OPAC of the Far Future (2013?)

• OPAC a staff tool for local holdings- again• Users get to library from discovery tools like

Google, Amazon, WorldCat• Library pushes metadata

outward into those tools• Libraries focus on local,

unique content

Search globally, get it locally

Search in WorldCat

Where it is

Future of the OPAC“Within the next five years, a large number of librarieswill no longer have local OPACS.Instead, we will have entered a new age of data consolidation(either shared catalogs or catalogs that are integrated intodiscovery tools), both of our catalogs and our collections. TheERM system and the ILS will be one and discovery will beoutsourced.”

Taiga Forum Provocative StatementsMarch 10, 2006

Finally, Don’t Panic

• The formats of today will soon be obsolete• ‘You are not a format.

You are a service”.*• Librarians have skills, training

and minds peculiarly fitted to the Information Age• Enjoy the change!

*The User is Not Broken, K. G. Schneider, 2006

Robotic Librarians? Probably not.For awhile, anyway.