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Do OPACs Suck?
June 13, 2006 08:00 AM | GeneralDonovan Lambright, Automation Librarian
Sorry for the provocative title, but it is actually appropriate here. Karen Schneider, aka the Free Range Librarian, recently posted a series of articles to ALA’s Techsource blog under the collective title How OPACs Suck.
It’s a very interesting read and I recommend it for those who are
thinking about OPAC design, patron behavior, and the ins and outs of
searching library collections.
In Part 1,
Karen takes OPACS to task for not providing relevance ranking in search
results. While Internet search engines like Google attempt to rank hits
based on their relevance to the query, most OPACs list hits based on
when the records were added to the bibliographic database. Not terribly
useful, as any public service librarian will attest. On the other hand,
search engines often are working with the full text of a web site while
OPACs are providing results based on metadata (MARC records) so there
is a certain amount of apples to oranges comparisons here. Still, this
doesn’t justify the lack of progress OPAC development has shown in this
area.
In Part 2,
Karen expands her list of problems with a checklist of OPAC
shortcomings including such hits as spell-checking (or the lack
thereof), insufficient field weighing, and weak functionality for
manipulating search results.
In Part 3,
Karen wraps it up with some broader concerns about the very concept of
the OPAC and questions the whole approach from bibliographic records to
cataloging to traditional library search methods.
Whether you
agree with all this or not, it makes a great read. Make sure to read
the comments others have added. Karen stirred up a lot of smart people
ranging from technology librarians to cataloging librarians to
reference librarians. That’s a pretty disparate group and getting them
all posting in the same place is no mean feat.
