Visions of a New OPAC

After last week's foray into the deficiencies of current OPACs and their vendors, I thought it would be useful if I looked for a few ideas of what people envision OPACs will look like in the (hopefully near) future. A sort of OPAC 2.0, if you will. I found several sites advocating for these new OPACs, though not everyone thinks of them in the same way. One in particular, called "a modern functional OPAC" on Aaron Schmidts blog "walking paper", had several interesting ideas that I hadn't come across in the "How OPACs Suck" articles last week. For instance, on the top of Schmidt's wish list was an OPAC that was seemlessly integrated into the library website, so that users wouldn't have to scramble back and forth between the OPAC and the institution's site. I really think this would be great. How many times have you been frustrated because you have to keep open a tab for the OPAC and a separate one for the library's site?

Schmidt also advocates a drag and drop backpack (or bookshelf) feature, similar to Amazon's shopping cart, which would be available on every page as a user searches through the different sections of the library's site. (This, of course, presumes that you already have a seamless OPAC-website interface.) So many commercial sites have appropriated this feature into their own systems--why haven't libraries? In addition, backpacks could also serve as the basis for patron communities, where patrons can view other patrons backpacks and look for other interesting items, etc. I find this to be a really exciting idea, sort of similar to LibraryThning, but incorporated into the library institution rather than wholly user-generated. There are, of course, issues of privacy that would need to be dealt with, and I imagine that continual maintenance of such a system would be more expensive than for current OPACs. Still, the idea that libraries can be just as much a community-building force online as they have been offline is a wonderful idea worth a lot of thought. Thus far, bibliophiles have had to create their own online book communities--shouldn't libraries be in on this?

For the most part, visions of future OPACs all want the same things, increased functionality, a more advanced and user-friendly user interface, and increased adaptability. Now all we have to do as library professionals is demand it. Here are some other fun/interesting sites:

If Amazon sucked like our old OPAC
LibraryCrunch OPAC Wishlist
Librarian.net OPAC manifesto