![\"Aquabrowser](\"http:\/\/151.236.222.184\/words\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/betageneral1.jpg\" "\\"Aquabrowser")
<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThe online catalogues (OPAC) were simple web interfaces supplied with the much larger Library management system (ILS or LMS) which ran the backend the public never saw. These were nearly always slow, ugly, unloved and not very useful.<\/p>\n
A couple of years a go(ish), we saw the birth of the next generation catalogue<\/em>, or search and discovery tools<\/em>. I could list them, but the Disruptive Technology Library Jester does an excellent job here<\/a>. I strongly suggest you take a look.<\/p>\n Personally, I think I first heard about Aquabrowser<\/a>. At the time a new OPAC which was miles ahead of those supplied with Library systems and was (I think) unique as a web catalogue interface not associated with a particular system, and shock, not from an established Library Company. The second system I heard about was probably Primo<\/a> from Ex Libris. At first not understanding what it was: It sounds like Metalib (another product from the same company which cross-searches various e-resource), is Primo replacing it? Or replacing the OPAC? It took a while to appreciate that this was something that sat on top of the rest. From then, VuFind<\/a>, LibraryFind<\/a> and more<\/a>.<\/p>\n While some where traditional commercial products (Primo, Encore, Aquabrowser), many more were open source solutions, a number of which developed at American Libraries. Often built on common (and modern) technology stacks such as Apache solr\/Lucene, Drupal, php\/java, mysql\/postgres etc. In the last year or so a number of major Libraries have started to use one of these \u2018Discovery Systems\u2019 for example: the BL<\/a> and Oxford<\/a> using Primo, National Libraries of Scotland<\/a> & Wales and Harvard<\/a> have purchased Aquabrowser and the LSE<\/a> is trying VuFind. At Sussex (where I work) we have purchased and implemented Aquabrowser<\/a>. We\u2019ve added data enrichments such as table of contents (searchable and visible on records), book covers and the ability to tag and review items<\/span> (tag\/reviewing has been removed for various reasons) .<\/p>\n It would be a mistake to put all of these in to one basket. Some focus on being a OPAC replacement, others on being a unified search tool, searching both local and online items. Some focus on social tools, tagging & reviewing. Some work out the box others are just a set of components which a Library can sow together, and some are \u2018SaaS<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an area that is fast changing. Just recently an established Library web app Company announced a forthcoming product called \u2018Summon<\/a>\u2019, which takes searching a library\u2019s online content a step further.<\/p>\n So what do libraries go for, it\u2019s not just potentially backing the wrong horse, but backing the wrong horse when everyone one else had moved on to dog racing!<\/p>\n And within all this it is important to remember \u2018what do users actually want\u2019. From the conversations and articles I\u2019ve read, they want a Google search box, but one which returns results from trusted sources and academic content. Whether they are looking for a specific book, specific journal, a reference\/citation, or one\/many keywords. And not just one which searches the metadata, but one which brings back results based on the full text of items as well. There are some that worry that too many results are confusing. As Google proves, an intelligent ranking system makes the number of results irrelevant.<\/p>\n Setting up (and even reviewing) most of these systems take time, and if users start to add data (tags, reviews) to one system, then changing could cause problems (so should we be using third party tag\/rating\/review systems?).<\/p>\n You may be interested in some other articles I\u2019ve written around this:<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot talk about discovery tools, but what sort to go for, who to back? And many issues have yet to be resolved. I\u2019m come on to those next\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a lot of talk in the Library world about \u2018next generation catalogues\u2019, library search tools and \u2018discovery\u2019. There\u2019s good reason for this talk, in this domain the world has been turned on its head. History in a nutshell: The card catalogue became the online catalogue, the online catalogue let users search for physical items […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[23,38,50,90,119,127],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-searching-and-libraries","tag-aquabrowser","tag-catalogue","tag-discovery","tag-library-20","tag-ngc","tag-opac"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nostuff.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nostuff.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nostuff.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nostuff.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nostuff.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nostuff.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nostuff.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nostuff.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nostuff.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n\n