New trends in OPACs – a comparison of add-ons, enhancements, and new designs: Part II

New trends in OPACs – a comparison of add-ons, enhancements, and new designs: Part II

a. Last week I looked at Aquabrowser, Encore, and Primo as Web replacemtents for OPACs. This week I wanted to continue the comparison and look at two that I hadn’t heard a lot about up until my recent discovery of them on http://dltj.org/article/niso-discovery-presentation-links/#comment-33084. The two websites I will look at for both are the originating sites, as their demo sites are under construction and are not fully functional yet. Blacklight’s is: http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/, and VuFind’s is: http://vufind.org/.

b. User’s needs: legibility, clarity, understandability, and navigability; language of users in search function(s); unique and different needs of users, including those with special needs AND Importance of content and arrangement of records to finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining items: display what is asked for in a meaningful way, not random; navigation correlates to displayed information in a logical way.

i. 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, an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat. It uses Solr to index, and Ruby on Rails on the front end, an open-source web framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. 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.

ii. Blacklight is a research project sponsored by the University of Virgnia Library. It looks as though you can do a regular search, a music search, or a “semester at sea” search. (?) A simple search brought up simple, correlated results.

iii. VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of a library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include Catalog Records, Locally Cached Journals, Digital Library Items, Institutional Repository, Institutional Bibliography, Other Library Collections and Resources. VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of the components. And since it's open source, you can modify the modules to best fit your need or you can add new modules to extend your resource offerings.

iv. It seems that VuFind offers more search result options, but this could be because it is further along in its research. You can search with faceted results, allowing for the user to search from a basic search box and then to be able to narrow down the results by clicking on the various facets of the results; or you can browse for resources, in which the user has the ability to browse the catalog allowing them to explore what the library has rather than only being able to see a very narrow spectrum of results. When viewing a record, the user will be offered suggestions in the form of “More like this” suggestions of resources that are similar to the current resource. The search results page is able to display the live status of a record through the use of AJAX by querying the catalog at that exact moment. And since it is done through AJAX after the results have loaded, the page will not slow down.

v. With VuFind, the user can learn more about the author through author bibliographies and see all of the books that they have written in the library. Persistent URLs allow the user to bookmark their queries or records to allow permanent access to a page they were once on. Users can save and tag any records with Zotero or any other COinS based application so they can store their records in one place. The user has the ability to save the resources from both the search results page and from the record view page to their own customizable lists. The lists can be retrieved at any time and will always be there for the user. This helps to eliminate the need for desktop based citation management software that tends to be too difficult for basic users.

vi. If I was choosing between VuFind and Blacklight based on the information given to me and the search results success, I would choose VuFind.

c. The requirement to follow accepted international standards for information content and structure:

i. With VuFind, the library can share their records with other institutions via the OAI Repository that is built in and the interface has translations available in English, French, Japanese, Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese with more to come.

ii. Although Blacklight didn’t offer up as much information on this end as VuFind, one could argue that it is following the global open source/open access and creative commons movement, epitomized by this year’s iSummit in Sapporo City, Japan.