Those who went to either Richard Wallis' API session or my OPAC session at the UKSG 2009 Conference will have heard about Richard's Open Source Juice Project. The project, which was launched at Code4Lib 2009, is designed to allow developers to create OPAC extensions (or, if you prefer, "bells and whistles") that, in theory, should [...]
Posts Tagged ‘opacs’
QR Codes in the OPAC?
Just wondering if anyone out there is already experimenting with QR Codes in their OPAC? We're trying to figure out the best way of providing item location information (e.g. floor and shelfmark), so I'm interested to know if anyone has already done this.
OPAC Survey 2009
Almost 2 years ago, 729 of you generously took time to fill out a survey about OPACs (archived here). You can find a selection of blog posts about the results here. I'm pleased to say that a follow-up survey is now being conducted by Bowker and I'd encourage as many of you as possible to [...]
JISC Developer Happiness Days (dev8D)
For my sins, I'm going to be facilitating the OPAC Community Meeting at the JISC Developer Happiness Days event in London next week. Although we've got "OPAC" in the name, I think the session should include anything to do with library catalogues, library usage data, MARC records, federated search engines, revelancy ranking, facets, etc We'd [...]
"Why you can't find a library book in your search engine"
It's good to see the ongoing OCLC debacle is starting to be picked up by the mainstream press in the UK — The Guardian newspaper has a large feature in their technology supplement today: "Why you can't find a library book in your search engine".
Google Book Search Data API
The new Google Book Search Data API has some really cool features and I'm wondering how much of it I can shoehorn into the OPAC? Our students increasingly expect the OPAC search box to be searching the full-text of our book stock — i.e. they type in several words that it would be useful to [...]
Green eco-friendly catalogue PCs
Warning — long blog post ahead! I've been promising to post something about our new catalogue PCs …but first, a bit of background: Like most large(ish) academic libraries, we've got dedicated catalogues PCs… lots of them… on every floor! From memory, we had at least 35 of them before the start of the refurbishment. We [...]
Visual virtual shelf browsing
The Zoomii web site seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment, so I got wondering how easy/difficult it would be do to a virtual bookshelf in the OPAC… It's definitely a "crappy prototype" at the moment, and the trickiest thing turned out to be getting the iframe to jump to the [...]
Google Graphs
We've had loan data on the OPAC for a couple of years now, although it's only previously been visible to staff IP addresses. Anyway, a couple of months ago, I revamped it using Google Graphs and I've finally gotten around to adding a stats link that anyone can peruse — you should be able to [...]
decorative tag cloud
It's not often that I'd consider adding pure "eye candy" to the OPAC, but I couldn't decide what would be the best way of making this tag cloud functional. So, I made an executive decision and decided it shouldn't be functional If you run a keyword search on our OPAC, at the foot of the [...]