OPAC 2.0 Anyone?
Library and Information Science January 31st, 2006
OPAC powered by Wordpress? I never thought of that. Here I am beginning to love and appreciate the power of this content management system (CMS) called Wordpress and here comes an idea to use it as an OPAC interface.
Check out Maison Bisson’s presentation to the ALA Midwinter meeting, entitled Designing an OPAC for Web 2.0. Honestly, the prototype wordpress powered OPAC is pretty amazing and would be a powerful tool for libraries once fully developed and implemented.
But somehow I agree with Steve Cohen that this OPAC will work for some, but not for other libraries who has to deal with other social issues. Steve of course is talking about libraries in the most advanced and privileged countries. What more for libraries in the other parts of the world.
Aside from these  social issues, there are other issues to be considered. Specifically, on what would be the database foundation of that OPAC? OPAC’s are built from relational database management systems which are capable of handling strings which are interrelated with each other. These data strings form the very essence of library catalogs. Can Wordpress handle huge amount of data lumped into fields, and records? I don’t think so.
And how about data interchangeability? The very reasons why library records are coded according to MARC format is to encourage data exchange. Can WP accomplish these? Can those API plugins be developed to answer these essential library database needs?
Wordpress is a powerful content management tool, we all agree on that. But I don’t think it can be a powerful library database management system. But if Maison Bisson can pull this one through, then goodbye Library System vendors!
Technorati Tags: OPAC 2.0, Wordpress, Library database, Web 2.0, Library 2.0
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