I blogged about Beth Jefferson’s Bib­lio­com­mons project last year, impressed with her goal of cre­at­ing a library cat­a­log inter­face from scratch that is focused on users and inte­grates com­mu­nity and social pieces around the con­tent, rather than tack­ing them on here and there. I also showed some screen­shots of the beta ver­sion in a pre­sen­ta­tion I did at Com­put­ers in Libraries this past spring in an attempt to high­light how things like reviews, tag­ging, and com­mu­nity could actu­ally work in a library cat­a­log if they weren’t an afterthought.

So it’s with great excite­ment that I read in Library Jour­nal that the first instal­la­tion of Bib­lio­com­mons is now live as the OPAC for the Oakville, Ontario, library in Canada. There is much to explore here, and I need to get in and see if any­thing has changed since the beta, but my favorite part is still the cat­a­log home page that shows actual users on it.

As I noted in my CiL talk, it’s refresh­ing just to see a cat­a­log I could log in to with a user­name instead of a bar­code — what a novel idea! Don’t even get me started on the fact that the inter­face includes terms like “con­nect,” “net­work,” and “trusted sources.” So much good stuff here, though — rat­ings, tags, lists, users, com­ments, rec­om­men­da­tions, faceted brows­ing, con­tex­tual help, nat­ural lan­guage (not jar­gon), user-based age rat­ings, “share with a friend” links, sim­i­lar titles, a shelf browser with cover images, and the abil­ity to get rewards for adding con­tent to the cat­a­log. I love that I didn’t have to dig deeply into the cat­a­log to start find­ing user-generated con­tent, as I often have to do in other OPACs when I need an example.

There’s even a con­test right now to help them gather feed­back from users (with an awe­some twist on the prize), not that they need this based on the beta, where users con­tributed far more con­tent than anticipated.

There are more screen­shots avail­able here, but I can’t encour­age you strongly enough to just go play with this cat­a­log on your own to see just how dif­fer­ent it is from yours. Even bet­ter, this inter­face can run over any vendor’s sys­tem, so adop­tion isn’t lim­ited and libraries don’t have to start over from scratch.

I will def­i­nitely con­tinue fol­low­ing Bib­lio­com­mons closely, and I hope Beth will be able to give a few more talks or write more arti­cles about the project to keep us update to date on usage of this great new prod­uct. Con­grat­u­la­tions to Beth and her team for get­ting a solid prod­uct with lots of poten­tial out the door, and kudos to the Oakville Pub­lic Library folks for imple­ment­ing it. This is def­i­nitely one to watch, and I know I’ll be post­ing more about it in the future.