LibraryThing introduces OPAC widgets – a trend?
LibraryThing the personal ‘Catatalogue your books online‘ site provides a sneak preview of its LibraryThing for Libraries widgets.
LibraryThing for Libraries is composed of a series of widgets, designed to enhancing library catalogs with LibraryThing data and functionality. The achievement is that the widgets require NO back-end integration.
These widgets require you to “Just add a single JavaScript tag, and one tag for every widget you want to display and we do the rest.” to the pages that display your OPAC, and you too can have Similar Books & Related Editions listings adding interest to to your OPAC display.
Tim Spalding from LibraryThing says, LibraryThing’s data is strongest in public library catalogs, it will be interesting to see how many sign up for his free trial, and upload a dump of their ISBN data.
“Just add a single JavaScript tag” – I wonder how many library system managers will be comfortable/capable/allowed to do that?
This is an excellent example of a trend that started with book-jacket feeds from the like of Syndetics and NBD, and continued with experiments with using extra data captured or contained within a library system – all to add value to the OPAC user experience.
Take these examples to their logical conclusion and you will end up with the catalogued data contained in in your system forming a small [but nevertheless critical] core of data presented to the user surrounded with data fed from all over the place enriching that user experience. [Hopefully] library user heaven, but possibly a library system manager’s nightmare – how many little bits of JavaScript will he/she have to just plug-in; will there be conflicts between them; what will happen when one or more of the services doesn’t behave itself?
I’m not trying to pour cold water on these developments, Tim should be applauded for driving forward on this. Nevertheless, if the ability to simply create a user interface for your library by mixing data from many sources is going to become a reality for the majority of libraries, there is going to have to be some major developments in the implementation process.
Imagine [not unrealistically] wanting to enrich your OPAC display with, book jackets from a commercial supplier and an open source of images; recommendations based upon the borrowing patterns of libraries in your local geographic, or subject specialisum, consortium; user ratings from a combination of your own users and LibraryThing; brief reviews from LibraryThing; in-depth reviews from Revish; FRBR related data from OCLC; LibraryThing related data; links to author pages in Wikipedia; etc., etc.
Just rereading that last paragraph tells you it just ain’t going to be sustainable in the real world, especially if you need to be uploading files of ISBNs all over the place.
There need to be developments on a couple of fronts. Firstly, being able to add many widgets in to your UI needs to be simple and understandable. Maybe UI prototypes from SirsiDynix, III, and Talis will address this? Secondly, an ecosystem needs to emerge atop of which these services can be delivered. Standards, both agreed and de facto, need to be established so that the individual innovations as they emerge can be utilized without the supplier of the service, or the vendor of ILS/LMS it is enriching, being a great hurdles.
Experience tells me that Tim will spend far more time than he ever expected to, producing ILS/LMS specific versions of his widgets. I also expect that the moment a library tries to add more than a couple of these sort of things to their UI, they are going to start wishing that they all operated in the same way. These are crucial factors that will hold back the general rollout of such features beyond a few innovative libraries.
What is needed is a Platform for delivering such services. The Talis Platform is an exemplar for augmenting data with enrichments from many dissimilar sources in a simple to integrate way. It is also a Platform that hides the complexity of maintaining that data. In addition the complex relationships between the data suppliers/providers their data and the consumers of that data, both in commercial [where relevant] and licensing terms, is something that needs to be hidden from the consumers to ensure the wide adoption of these services.
Oh no – I hear you say – yet another Talis blog praising the wonders of the Talis Platform. Yes, and I make no excuses for it. As others are starting to recognize there is something innovative and different about the Platform that I have yet to see demonstrated elsewhere in the library world. – When I see other examples I will post about those as well.
In the meantime, good luck to LibraryThing, and others I know who are following similar roads. It is these individual pieces of innovation that will collectively drive us all forward.
Technorati Tags: Talis, Library, Talis Platform, LibraryThing, SirsiDynix, III, Syndetics, NBD, Revish, Cenote, Bigfoot
April 10th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Thanks for your qualified encouragement. We are, I think, heading in the same direction. We want to give libraries the tools they need to make their catalogs–well, I was going to say “better,” but the simple truth is “not completely suck.”
I think we’ll see increasing modularization of OPACs, as librarians and the people who sell to them acknowledge what the technology world long ago understood, that monolithic software is dead. It will come in a number of different ways—innovations by traditional vendors, Talis’ radical rethinking of the problem, new solutions like WPOPAC and add-ons like LibraryThing’s widgets.
Of these options, LibraryThing’s option is, in a sense, the least daring, the least experimental. We’ve designed “around” integration—avoided changing or even dealing with internals.
We did this first of all because most OPACs can’t integrate or change. This is a sad fact. I suspect you’re right that many library services departments will not be able to add a single line of JavaScript to their templates. I’ve already been told that many won’t be able to export their ISBNs. It boggles the mind. If you can’t do that, what CAN you do? Can you change your logo? How many hundreds of thousands of dollars are you paying for this?
One thing you can probably do is integrate with companies like Syndetics, ones willing to pass on a portion of their hefty fees to the ILS vendors who control access. Again, a sad fact, and one that needs changing.
And that’s the second reason we don’t intgrate–to avoid the ILS-vendor trap. We don’t want to get locked into one platform. And we don’t want to wait twelve months before the next version supports our data.
The avoidance of integrating is deep. Our widgets don’t work on all the OPACs we’ve tested so far because we made them work. They work because they don’t *care* about the OPAC. Far from being adapted to all OPACs, the widgets don’t know from OPACs at all. They would work on Amazon, on Abebooks, on personal sites, even on blogs. All they need is an ISBN somewhere on the page; JavaScript does the getting and putting.
We will, of course, offer RSS and XML versions of every widget. But they will probably get a lot less use. If you can’t add a tag to your OPAC, you sure as heck can’t be parsing XML!
The Talis Platform offers a better way forward–a ground-up rethinking of the OPACs and its data. It may not be the “answer,” but it’s heading in the right direction, an achievement particularly impressive considering the industry context. But you need to convince two hostile groups–the ones who are happy with the million-dollar monolithic OPAC, and the ones so burned by ILS vendors that they will never trust one again.
April 10th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Tim,
It’s great to have company as we ride two separate camels in the same trek across the desert of OPAC integration. (A bit poetic I know, but I think you’ll get the picture I’m trying to paint)
It’s also a relief to be told that we only have two hostile groups to convince!