Palos Verdes, working with Crafty Space, has moved to SOPAC2 and in the process contributed back to the project some much-needed multi-branch support which will be included in the forthcoming 2.1 release, later this summer.

This launch comes right on the heels of receiving the 2009 LITA Brett Butler Award for the SOPAC project.  So I’m feeling really good about SOPAC right now and especially about the community that is beginning to spring up around it–its users, the libraries, and a solid group of about nine people who are part of its active development group.

Be sure to visit the PVLD site and tag a few books for them.

Anyone else?  Koha?  Evergreen?

Announcement on TheSocialOPAC.net

Read more at thesocialopac.net.

You can visit the new site and download the software at TheSocialOPAC.net.

The purpose of the site is to help a build a community of developers and users around the SOPAC project suite.  It will undoubtably grow over time as the software does.  We have big plans for SOPAC and invite you all to join the community.

Josh Hadro has written a very nice article about the particulars of the new social catalog application suite, and Richard Wallis has posted a podcast of a conversation I had with him last week about it.

We’re lucky to have such a great staff here in Darien, all of whom have put a huge amount of effort to making the new site a success.  Thanks guys!

And now, it’s time for a nap!

As you probably know, SOPAC 1.0 was written for the Ann Arbor District Library catalog while I was working there. It was, however, a collection of ‘hacks’ that I made in order to get that functionality working within the Drupal framework of aadl.org.  I did release the 1.0 code but as I said at the time, it would “definitely not work out-of-the-box”.  It was a highly-customized module made available so that other developers could play with it.

When I began work on SOPAC 2.0, I kept two prime directives in mind.  First, it had to have the potential to work with any ILS.  Second,  it had to be a highly-configurable, distributable package.  In other words, it has been completely rewritten from the ground-up to be a real software “product”.  This will be a project that is managed and maintained by Darien Library.  We will make the beta available under GPLv3 once we get our legs back under us after Sept 1st.

How it Works

SOPAC 2.0 itself is a non-trivial project. It is an expansive Drupal module that completely integrates all online catalog and patron activity.  It is written for Drupal 6 and takes exclusive advantage of Drupal 6′s hooks and APIs.  The result is that it is 100% theme-able and template-able.  You will be able to make your catalog look exactly the way you want it to look without exception.  Virtually every element of the patron account integration is also configurable.

In order to make SOPAC 2.0 possible, however, I’ve decided to create two software libraries that operate independently of each other.  The first, Locum, provides a catalog discovery layer as well as ILS-independent abstraction for all catalog-related activity.  It can be used by any PHP application, not just SOPAC.  So, for example, you could ostensibly port SOPAC to Joomla using Locum as the sublayer.  Locum allows developers to “drop in” connector pieces for their own ILS.  Locum (and anything built on top of it) doesn’t care if you are a III library or a SirsiDynix library or a Koha library.

The second software library, Insurge (Independent Social Repository), is in response to my feelings about the inadequacy of local, community-driven social data.  On one hand, I recognize the value and importance of highlighting local social data, but for the purposes of search and content discovery, it’s just not a large enough data-set.

My original intent was to store all the social data within the Drupal database (as it is in SOPAC 1), but I was not terribly thrilled with that prospect, so I began to envision a second abstraction that was dedicated just to bibliographic social data and which could be shared, freely, between different institutions.  In addition to our own tags and reviews, we can choose which other libraries we want to pull social data from.  We would, in turn, sync up our new data so that other libraries could download and use it. In this way,we have the opportunity to “highlight” our own local reviews and tags while taking advantage of a larger pool of data.  The best of both worlds.

Naturally, there are many nuances and complexities involved in all this and we will be launching a dedicated site for the product suite that will allow users and developers to start building a support base.

I’m sure there will be a myriad of questions and I will answer them as I can but if I don’t reply to your email or comment right away it’s because September 1st is closing in fast and it’s two weeks and two days to bingo time.

I just snapped this screenshot about five minutes ago of our tag cloud. As you can see, a real cloud is emerging. But let’s look at stats for a second.

As far as tagging is concerned, 330 tags have been entered. 97 catalog items have been tagged with 245 distinct tags. 27 people have put tags into our catalog.

Stats for reviews are a little smaller, probably because reviewing an items demands a greater time investment on the part of the user. As of now, 21 reviews have been placed on 21 items by 16 people (4 of whom are staff members). That’s about an average of 9 per day. I expect that will pick up as more users become aware of this service.

Of course, compared to a high-traffic social web site like Flickr, these stats are unimpressive, but for a single library, I think they are promising.

Library web site users tend to cross a wider spectrum of computer literacy, so the whole concept of reviewing and tagging may be completely alien to a lot of aadl.org’s visitors. We’re in a little bit of uncharted territory here, so I’ll be sure to do a number of updates as time goes on.

It only took a year, but I finally got permission to go ahead with implementing what I’ve dubbed “The SOPAC” here at AADL. That would be “cute-speak” for Social OPAC. The SOPAC represents a slew of features that I’ve wanted to implement for quite some time now. I’m rather excited to see if library users will respond to these tools in an OPAC setting as much as Web 2.0 users have to commercial social networking sites. I’m fairly confident they will. Mainly, I’m relieved that I no longer need to talk conceptually about features I’ve been planning to build on top of the catalog.

So what is the SOPAC? It’s basically a set of social networking tools integrated into the AADL catalog. It gives users the ability to rate, review, comment-on, and tag items. The concept is nothing new, but the nature of our systems do not yield readily to this kind of retrofitting–something I plan to really start tackling in earnest, but that’s a topic for another post.

If you’re wondering (and didn’t know already), AADL’s automation system is III which recently released a software package called “Encore” that does some of what the SOPAC does. We did not purchase it, nor do we intend to. Instead we’re going to use the money we saved to buy a Lexus. *grin*

Anyway, I’ve been messing around a bit with Snapz Pro, and thought that since this is a pretty big upgrade to AADL’s site, I would include a screencast covering most of the new features. So for those with 15 minutes or so to kill (ignore the screaming kids in the background):

SOPAC Features

The “front door” to the SOPAC is, of course, the main catalog search screen. Drupal’s API made development of this code relatively painless. For example, the blocks on the right-hand side use Drupal’s hook_block function, making the development of those blocks simply a matter of writing a function that would return the content. In this case, the right-hand column contains search, tag, and review information.

Let’s take a look at some of those blocks:

These two blocks represent the contextual nature of SOPAC. The first block appears in the regular SOPAC, while the second is displayed in the use management tools.

Here are some sample review pages:

Top of review page:

Reviews themselves:

Public view of all my reviews:

Private view of all my reviews:

While writing a review, you can simultaneously add tags for the item you’re reviewing. Or you can simply tag catalog items without reviewing them. Here are some same examples of the tag system:

Personal tag cloud (My tags in cloud-vew mode):

Personal tag list. This is where users can manage their tags. Delete, modify, view, etc.

List of items in the catalog tagged with “dogs”:

Feel free to visit the AADL catalog to tag and/or review some items. You do need an account to create content, but you don’t need a library card to get an account, so these features are not limited to cardholders in any way.

Because I feel that this version of AADL.org is a significant milestone, I’ve made a tarball of the source code publicly available for download. Included in the tarball is our middle-ware “glue” that allows us to interface Drupal with the III server in addition to all the SOPAC code and supporting libraries. Bear in mind that this code will definitely not work out-of-the-box but could definitely be made to work with any III server with XMLOPAC support.

You can download the package here, or from my files section.