After much anticipation, version 2.0 of the Social Opac (SOPAC) went live this morning at the Darien Library in Connecticut.

It looks very good… excellent, in fact.  I am already looking forward to playing with this version of the software.  What I really like at first glance:

• It was created with everyone in mind:  in theory can be coupled with any ILS for both the catalog and patron information.
• It is designed to allow sharing of reviews and other public content between libraries, thereby creating a larger social “pool”.
• The design is clean and looks to be well laid out.

The only problematic aspect I see initially is that it fails XHTML validation in a fairly dramatic way:  the doctype is listed as XHTML 1.0 Strict, but appears to have over 50 problems with the home page alone (over 200 for an OPAC search result page).  By just looking at the numbers, each type of page comes dramatically closer to validating as HTML 4.01 Strict (19 errors and 67 errors respectively) which seems odd to me.

Compromises in validation often have to be accepted for results pages, but I see no reason for not having a standards-compliant entry page.  I suspect that this could be a great “clean up” project once the dust has settled from the upgrade.

Overall, this is a great accomplishment, and a great piece of software.  This is certain to grab a lot of well-deserved attention, and will hopefully inspire all ILS and OPAC creators to improve their products.

thanks to Jessamyn for her post

LibraryThing for Libraries has launched!  Without needing to alter your existing ILS software beyond a few lines of javascript in your OPAC’s page footer, you can add the following functionality to your book catalog:

• Links to other editions and translations.
• Links to “similar books”.
• A Tag Cloud, which can do wonders to supplement our often obscure subject headings.

Features that are forthcoming include patron reviews and ratings. 

The first place to go live with this is the Danbury Library in CT.  Check out their catalog to see how well everything integrates.

How do you get this?  Well, for now at least, you just need to contact Tim or Abby at LibraryThing and take a bit of time to set things up.  If they get too swamped in requests, they may need to start charging a “setup fee”.  Their blog entry gives quite a bit of detail on what they’re doing.

from the NGC4Lib listserv