"The end product will be a design document to inform open source library system development efforts, to guide future library system implementations, and to influence current Integrated Library System vendor products."
Mitis-Stanzel, Irene (2008) Social Tagging in Bibliotheken. MSc Thesis, Postgraduate programme in Library and Information Studies, Austrian National Library (Austria), University of Vienna (Austria).
# Perennial favorites open source, APIs, and mobile devices given as top trends, among others
# Technology glitches during streaming video, distracting chat room discussion during panel
# Karen Coyle: Future may not involve libraries "if we don't make some extreme changes."
Äußerst interessantes Thesenpapier über die Zukunft sog. Discovery Tools in Bibliotheken. Besonders (aber nicht nur) der Abschnitt über OPACs ist auch für Deutschland höchst relevant.
What the world needs now is not another metasearch engine. Mind you, having more and better and even free metasearch engines is a good thing, but there are already many metasearch engines, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and even some that are free and open source (e.g., see Oregon State’s LibraryFind). Metasearch isn’t an effective solution for the problem at hand.
In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn't find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a <FORM> element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.
Blacklight is an open source OPAC (online public access catalog). That means libraries (or anyone else) can use it to allow people to search and browse their collections online. Blacklight uses Solr to index and search, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently, Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MaRC records and several kinds of XML documents, including TEI, EAD, and GDMS. Blacklight was developed at the University of Virginia Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0 license.
DiscoverLibrary is a new search and discovery tool for the library’s vast collection of resources. A simple search box will bring back results from a number of different sources, including Acorn, the library’s catalog, and the Vanderbilt TV News Archive. Additionally, many of the library’s online article databases are searchable through DiscoverLibrary on the second tab.
This is the initial release of DiscoverLibrary, and its development is an ongoing process. Over time we will add new resources and features, as well as refine the user interface. Please help us make the new service better by leaving your suggestions and comments in the box to the right.
There’s a “growing disconnect in what we’re being provided from commercial companies ... and what libraries are starting to realize they need,” he said, but libraries aren’t blameless either: He believes they need to communicate more effectively the features and functionality they require. And just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it’s better. Soon enough, Gibbons suggested, open source innovations might spur competition and eventually result in more and better choices in the consumer market.