Kate Shee­han

the OPAC sucks

showed Library­Thing
Kate stalked Tim Spauld­ing in order to be the first beta tester of Library­Thing for Libraries
LfL takes all of the warm, fuzzy, reader-generated infor­ma­tion about books and puts it into your cat­a­log
showed a record with MARC info above and LfL info below on the screen
showed tag cloud

you end up click­ing around from book to book in Library­Thing think­ing “I want to read this, this, this, this, this“
when do peo­ple ever just hang out in your cat­a­log?
LfL is great for reader’s advisory

showed the code side of it — it’s just 3 lines!
mon­keys could do this — it’s really that easy :-p
it’s like Syn­det­ics info — it’s just out­side content

using Inno­v­a­tive for their cat­a­log
imple­mented LfL in April 2007

cost:
.003-.006 cents per circ of books (not count­ing A/V mate­ri­als)
frac­tions of a penny per circ
they’re really nice peo­ple and they’ll work with you; no hard sell
why can’t we have this expe­ri­ence all the time??
*and* they under­stand the con­straints libraries are under (POs, etc.)
floor entry is $1000

staff have loved it
Kate loves how easy LfL is for folks to use with­out hav­ing to under­stand how to log in to a site
thinks patrons like it, although they don’t give a lot of feed­back about it
patrons like it when staff shows it to them

they just added stats
the ser­vice includes children’s books, but it’s stronger in YA

she had a big social jus­tice moment when they did this — “we can do this — it doesn’t have to be just the big libraries“
it’s not extra work, and it’s very easy to add
the OPAC still kinda sucks, but it’s bet­ter than it was
Dan­bury just isn’t going to be able to do a SOPAC, it doesn’t have the resources, so this is great for them

LfL has a full-time pro­gram­mer and a cus­tomer ser­vice rep
might be work­ing on patron reviews and rat­ings back into LfL

No tags for this post.