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