Jennifer is an MLS student who is working on a paper for a summer class. She’s put together a list, a long list, of blog posts relevant to user experience and our online library catalogs or you might know it as the My OPAC sucks meme. In case you think you may have missed a post of two, go back and check.
Tag: opac
make Amazon suck like your OPAC. innovative + api haxie
If Amazon sucked like our old OPAC. To be fair, this Innovative version is pretty ancient. Funny? Yes. Accurate? Not entirely. [thanks marlene]
interested in nextgen OPACs?
You might be interested in the Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries list, newly created from some ideas batting around on the web4lib list.
cautionary OPAC tale
You know how gamers like to sometimes memorize button sequences that will enable them to get out of tricky situations or basically cheat? Well, let’s try to figure out how to recreate the code that caused this Sirsi ILS to automatedly order one copy of everything. Anyone from PSU in the house?
On the day of the time change to daylight savings time earlier this month, an unknown someone at my library went to change the time in our Workflows system. Somehow this action triggered a sequence of events in the program that led from point A to point B, the latter point being that the system emailed out to the vendors an order for every item that had ever been ordered by any branch of our library since May of 2001. We are talking about millions and millions of items ordered overnight. Some orders to large vendors, like Yankee, consisted of tens of thousands of items.
promiscuous library [data]
Seeking skunkworks and promiscuous library data is an article I should have linked to a few weeks ago. If you don’t know what a skunkworks is, the article has a helpful link (and now this one does too!). In short, the article posits that it would be easier to hammer out flexible user intercfaces if it were easier to get raw standardized data OUT of ILSes that do the hard work of circulation, patron, and money management, things that don’t need to look pretty, or as pretty. Very long, very well-linked and cited, very worth reading.