The Social OPAC – SOPAC
Friday, April 3rd, 2009As the libraries in Nordhordland are preparing to get the "Aquabrowser" installed, a vendor-installed layer to their catalogues that is supposed to add advanced and eye-candy search possibilities to their collections, there is a very interesting module project for Drupal: The SOPAC, aka the social OPAC. It could provide a functionality that is comparable to that.
It is especially interesting, because what most of the libraries in the norwegian districts suffer from is lack of time and money - which often ends up forgetting how people tend to use - and how they are looking for media. Dividing your webside and the web interface of the catalogue is not helping.
This is a problem that all libraries want to fix, but not everybody is so lucky to have the necessary resources to do that. Still, library services are not less needed whether they are being online or offline.
You can get an idea of what the Social OPAC can do if you look at the catalogue of the Darien library.