some end of the week short links

It’s been a busy week this week. I had eight people come to computer drop-in time on Tuesday which was a tech frenzy of PayPal and email and inserting graphics and Yahoo mail address books. I’ve had a few of these links hanging around for a while waiting to find time to write proper posts, but I figured I’ll drop them in here. I see a lot of blogging as playing hot potato with a bunch of web content. You find it, you pass it on, the next person passes it on. The more content you shift, the easier it is to quickly ascertain which things you need to save for longer perusal and which need to just get passed on for the next person. I’ve read and absorbed these and thought you might like them.

librarian joke

I went to a panel discussion the “Catalog Transformed” featuring Andrew Pace, John Blyberg, Jina Wakimoto, Jill Newby and Cindy Levine. Andrew showed off their Endeca-based OPAC and explained why it had a feature set that ran circles around all the other currently available tools. Cindy did some sample searches and generally showed the thing off. John Blyberg, speaking about his ILS Customers Bill of Rights started out this way, “How many people in this room are satisfied with their OPAC?” No one raised their hand… except for, after a moment, Andrew Pace. Bump, set, spike.

NCSU Libraries new “pig butchering” OPAC

We talk a lot about what library catalogs could look like, but who is building them? Well, Andrew Pace and NCSU for one. Here is the press release announcing their new Endeca-powered OPAC. Why is it different? It focuses on relevance instead of some arbitrary criteria — our OPAC at one of my old jobs would list DVDs by add date, so all the ones that showed up at the top a search list were labeled “IN PROCESS” and thus not available to patrons — and allows simple search narrowing. Andrew explains more. Don’t let me blather on about it, check it out yourself (and notice the slick URL while you’re at it). [web4lib]