The Hennepin County Library, a consortium of public libraries serving Minneapolis and surrounding suburb areas, has an excellent website and OPAC. The website has a number of great features including Ask a Librarian, a section of downloads, a number of audience and subject specific sections, and more. The audience specific sections include ones targeted to children, teenagers, and people 55+. Another section is WorldLinks, which contains links to language collections, library resources specific to Spanish, African, Hmong, and Somali languages and cultures, countries and travel, learning English, and resources on immigration and gaining U.S. citizenship.
The most interesting section of the website is the BookSpace, shown above, which won the 2006-2007 Technology Solutions Award by the Public Technology Institute. The BookSpace has a number of resources available to people browsing for good books that fit their interests to read. These resources include a number of lists of recommended books for different genres, which allow readers to simply look under the appropriate section for books that fit their interests. Readers can also submit their own reading lists, giving the library’s patrons another for locating good books recommended by other patrons. Reader-submitted recommended reading lists also allows for the potential for creating new and interesting connections between books made by those readers that would not be otherwise available. Another nifty feature is that users can post comments on both the individual books and the readers’ lists, thereby allowing them to express their opinion on the quality of the book or list.
BookSpace also has a collection of resources under the label “Find a Good Book” designed to help users find more books that will interest them. Included are databases and websites which help users find books that are based on books and/or topics in which they are interested; books with similar writing styles, plot, characters, and settings; reviews; more recommended books; and more. Another very interesting feature is the “‘If you like’ Author Search,” which finds the styles, and genres in which a user might be interested, given the author they entered and whose writing they liked. Also included in the BookSpace are resources allowing users to view new books, find materials and books for book clubs, and do further research of books and authors. All together, BookSpace presents an extremely useful set of resources for patrons to utilize in finding the book that will meet their needs.
Another feature of the Hennepin County Library’s website that I find interesting is the section for downloadable content. The library offers select audiobooks, videos, and music that can be checked out for a limited time period and downloaded. After the check-out time is up, it seems that the content will self-delete. It is somewhat disappointing that only a few media formats are supported – for instance iPods or Macs are not supported – but it is an interesting effort to reach into this area of the information market.
The library’s OPAC offers all the standard features. Some of the more interesting features it offers are a summary of the work and an excerpt from the work. The OPAC records also link to the comments provided by readers. Given that the county library is made up of a number of branch libraries, another useful feature of the catalog shows where the books are located and their availability. All told, the Hennepin County Library website and OPAC form a strong online presence for the public library.
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