Redesigning the OPAC: moving outside the ILMS (1).(Online Public access Catalogue, Integrated Library Management System)

Recent years have seen the emergence of strong competitors to the role of the library as an information provider. These competitors include search engines, online encyclopedias and bookstores, and, unlike libraries, they have been able to develop rapidly and unfettered by past approaches or entrenched service delivery models. Behind these new services are hard commercial drivers that are related to attracting users on the web, among them the need to be fast, efficient, easy, and relevant to users. Libraries have not had such hard business drivers; consequently, our information services have been much slower to adapt.

A belated response across libraries, based on acknowledging that our current toolsets and services are no longer adequate to meet these new world challenges, is now gathering momentum. It is becoming accepted that libraries need to develop new tools that are appropriate to a networked web world increasingly populated by Generation Y users moving in a wide-ranging online social environment supported by technology based on integrated and on-demand content from various websites (mashups). (2)

Current moves that recognise a new web environment (Web 2.0) and the need to develop a new library environment (Library 2.0) extend beyond tools to simply improve remote access to library services. These include initiatives to make library resources more readily discoverable on the general web (e.g. opening library holdings to search engines), to communicate more effectively to users on the web (e.g. blogs), to provide relevant new services (e.g. podcasts, gaming), and to allow increased user interaction (e.g. tagging, user reviews). (3)

Significant debate is beginning to emerge about the methodology and approach necessary to make library tools such as the Online Public access Catalogue (OPAC) more web friendly, easier to use, and compatible with external web services. (4) It is recognised that we need to do more than just 'put lipstick on a pig' (5), but relatively few production examples exist as to what should be done and how it could be achieved. (6) This paper is an exploration of the issues involved with OPAC redesign in the modern web environment, and is based on the real-world issues experienced by the State Library of Tasmania in developing a replacement for its Integrated Library Management System (ILMS)-based OPAC.

OPAC Beginnings

The library OPAC developed as a tool to locate those physical resources that had been acquired and stored by the library itself. Within the ILMS these resources were, first, described within the acquisitions and bibliographic database, and then accessed by the public via the OPAC. The OPAC and the bibliographic database were two aspects of the same overall software. OPAC design and functionality over the past ten years have seen a number of important changes. These include adapting bibliographic database capacity so as to include or reference non-print materials and digital content, such as images and full text on a local network, and, more recently, to link to wide-area networks and open web content.

Access on the OPAC to this new content still required the existence of a descriptive record in the bibliographic database. The extensive work required to create new bibliographic records strictly limited the range of non-library holdings that could be indexed or catalogued and subsequently referenced through the OPAC. For this and other reasons, libraries have frequently developed other resource collections outside the ILMS that have separate indexing and access methods. Examples of these external collections include images and other digitisation datastores, lists of recommended web resources, and online journal collections.

The growth of modern technology and high-speed networks now mean that it is possible to separate the OPAC from the bibliographic database used by the library to manage its holdings. The capacity to extract, move, and import large amounts of data in modern computer systems is well developed. This has been coupled with the capacity of new search-engine type applications to efficiently index large volumes of data to provide powerful real-time searching and results handling. In this new context, an OPAC need not necessarily be part of the ILMS, and as a consequence, need not be limited by traditional ILMS-based OPAC functionality.

The State Library of Tasmania has now embarked upon this path of separating the OPAC from the ILMS. In 2005/06 a tender was issued and completed to acquire new software that could index data exported from the library's bibliographic database, as well as from other datastores managed by the library. This software was required to provide powerful searching capacity and to allow a user-friendly web-orientated approach to searching, results management, and resource access.

A software…