OPACs

Well it's better than "online card catalog" yes?

Well, fewer and fewer nowadays. But we're discouraged from making changes, making choices...

More than we might think. Colors, defaults, layouts, features. Some "features" the vendor may try to sell you can be kludged in from other sources.

Some local examples:

• Aldrich
• Rutland

What can be ugly: color schemes, layout, URLs, results, clickpaths

• defaulting to something non-intuitive
• something hard to use

Usability means

• "the elegance and clarity with which the interaction with a computer program or a web site is designed." (wk)
• efficient, easy to learn, satisfying to use
• memorable patterns, fixable errors

Here are a few specifcs.

• Evergreen?
• NCSU Endeca?
• AADL?
• hacking your own...
• tools that search the way we remember.

• YakPac? (from LibLime)
• Scriblio?
• Open Library?
• PennTags? (social bookmarking)

Jessamyn West is a community technology librarian and the editor of the weblog librarian.net. She teaches email classes for seniors, builds tiny websites for tiny libraries and advocates for sensible technology use for everyone.

IM her at iamthebestartist.

This presentation was created in HTML using CSS. There was no PowerPoint involved in this presentation except as a nagging bad example. The layout and stylesheet are available to borrow via a share and share alike creative commons license. See source code for details.

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