Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

CIL2010: SOPAC 2.1: Digital Strategy for the New Library

This was a presentation from John Blyberg from Darien Library in Connecticut.  What is SOPAC?  It’s a social OPAC built on the Drupal content management system.  The impetus behind SOPAC was to take a best of breed content management system that was open source and merge it with the catalog.

John says: “You may have the best website in the world, but when your user click on Catalog–BOOM, they’re in the ghetto.”

Ann Arbor wanted to create an online persona and identity connected with the library.
Three libraries currently running SOPAC are Darien Library, Ann Arbor District Library, and the Palos Verdes Library District. Newport Beach Public Library and the SAILS Library Network in Massachusetts are both mid-integration with SOPAC.

With SOPAC, all online activities with the library are conducted through DRUPAL.  SOPAC invokes two software libraries: LOCUM & Insurge.  It runs with SQL and Sphinx.

SOPAC development is user experience driven.  It is built for end users, not librarians.  They wanted a catalog that would be friendly to their users.  Users don’t care about the little stuff librarians do, all they want is to find materials in an environment that doesn’t make them feel stupid.  The catalog should look really nice.

Tagging in SOPAC is key.  The community tags items which changes the ability for everyone else to find things.  That element was a key change from SOPAC 1 to SOPAC 2.  They also use tagging to provide staff favorites.  It is a dynamic list that lets you sort the list in many ways.  They also use “better than the book” as a tag to mark movies that were better than the books they were based on.  Darien does a program called “Meet us on Main Street.”  It’s a readers advisory session where librarians recommend books that are coming out, favorite titles and subjects, etc.  They now keep a list of all of the books using tagging in the catalog.  One of their librarians needed to create a booklist (Middlesex autobiography), and simply asked the entire staff to help build the list, each person contributing one or two titles.

SOPAC does reviews and ratings. SOPAC 2.1 has a new design for the item record page.  It includes the reviews, summaries, ratings, location (called “where to find it”) and more right there on the record page in a very clean interface.

SOPAC can sort by most popular this week & most popular this month since it can tap into circulation data.  SOPAC lets you sort by top-rated items.

SOPAC offers a MyLibrary page within your account, showing your recent ratings, reviews, tags, and saved searches (which have RSS output), etc.  You can actually place holds right from the link in your RSS reader.  They are also working on an auto-hold feature which sounds freaking awesome.  If you want to place a hold on anything in a particular category no matter what it will auto-place it with no intervention from the patron whatsoever.

As an open source project, SOPAC is a portable piece of software.  If you can develop something new that’s neat (e.g. SAILS has created a carousel book cover widget), then that gets shared back with the community as a whole.  The sky is the limit as far as the potential for mash-ups with SOPAC’s data.

Drupal lets you use taxonomy to put SOPAC content anywhere in your site.  You don’t have to find the cover images or URLs, it brings in Syndetics information, brings in the MARC record and the circulation data about availability.  jquery is an Ajax library that lets you do a lot of things like creating carousel images, set up a book shelf, an iTunes like cover-flow, anything.  These are all things SOPAC developers are actively playing with.  They just have to find a way to integrate it into the user experience.

SOPAC also allows you to track items that have just been returned.  They have a display on the website that shows recently returned items.  It updates every 10 seconds, and eliminates anything that’s on hold for someone else.  They have the data displayed on LCD screens in the library.  So people can come up and say to the circ desk staff that they want one of the recently returned books that they just saw on the LCD display.

They also have an LCD display showing new items, and another showing most popular fiction.  All of this is based on circulation data and SOPAC functionality.

SOPAC 2.1 next steps:

• Twitter integration. They want to send out newly-posted reviews, updates, events, and overdue notices via Twitter. They also want to let users send the library Tweets with item requests and feedback. They already have it set up so anytime a staff member changes the website, that URL automatically goes out on Twitter.
• SMS and phone integration for the same functions above.
• Organic groups – They want to incorporate the organic groups module that Drupal offers so that users can generate user groups on the fly based on their interests.
• Customer Relationship Management – They want to build profiles of what users do at the library (what they check out, what types of reference questions they ask, what comments they leave, etc.). John acknowledges the privacy issues inherent in such a pursuit, but wants to let people’s interests connect them to other people using the library’s services

SOPAC is looking at developing an iPhone app and Android app. This would let users see their account & the catalog from their mobile devices, just as they do on the computer. They also are looking at distributed self-check…letting users take a photo of the barcode on a book and checking it out to themselves.

A question was asked about vendors blocking them in the future. John said it’s possible, but they will do whatever they can to work around it.

A question was asked about the privacy issues with their newer developments. John’s response was that they are mindful of it, but they won’t let privacy fears hamstring their development of features that users want.

A question was asked about what vendors it currently works with: Innovative Interfaces, Symphony, Libre, Koha, and several other libraries are looking at other ILS connectors.

A question was asked about how many people are working on the code. 5 main developers but there are about 10 people working on the code.

A question was asked about the staff time necessary to get it going. John says you need somewhere who has knowledge of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

A question was asked about server requirements. He said it would run on Linux, a Mac, but he doesn’t know about Windows.

A question was asked about why they are pursuing an iPhone app. John says they’re looking at both Android & iPhone.

cil2010, computers in libraries