SOPAC 2.1 - SOcial OPAC

SOPAC
John Blyberg, Assistant Director, Innovation & User eXperience
Darien Public Library

SOPAC transformed the way Darien did business with their users
"SOcial" OPAC (online public access catalog) - open source, built on Drupal, and integrate with catalog
To the end-user, the transition from the website to the catalog is jarring - so SOPAC integrates the experience
a cohesive online digital strategy for your library
3 libraries running: Darien (CT), Ann Arbor (MI), Palos Verdes (CA)
2 more libraries coming online: Newport Beach (CA), SAILS Library Network (MA)
how does it work?
SOPAC keeps users in Drupal, a layer that is a social services suite (2 libraries: INSURGE - social data, LOCUM - business rules) & connector piece to allow it to connect to any ILS
SOPAC development is UX-driven (built for end-users, not librarians) - end users don't want to feel stupid
SOPAC had to look good, had to have visual appeal for users
Tagging in SOPAC
- this has changed the way Darien does business
- when user tags something, it gets reindexed - part of keyword search is the tag
- key change from SOPAC1 to SOPAC2
- staff uses tagging feature extensively
- used to have a rack of "staff favorites", now tag in catalog - "staff favorites"
- can sort results list by any number of elements - can browse through "staff favorites"
- added tag for movies that are "better than book"
- "Meet us on Main Street" - program they put on ev. Wed. - "Main St." is part of library - reading group / group reader's advisory - growing in popularity - they hadn't been keeping a list, so then they added a tag for "meet us on main st." & can now browse through that
- "middlesex autobiography" - crowd-sourced a booklist of autobiographies for a teacher, rather than library staff taking time to develop the book list
- other uses, beyond end-user experience
Reviews and Ratings in SOPAC
- some people develop a "voice" & people follow all of their reviews
Hot Fiction
- can track circ data & include into index - can run on the fly - just sort by most popular this week, this month
- favorite fiction search - based on ratings - what your peers like/don't like

SOPAC & "Me"
- building a profile - an identity attached to the library
- hold list - auto-hold - RSS feeds

SOPAC & Drupal
- excited about changes coming in Drupal7, Views3, CCK3
- SAILS website going to go live in a while - prototype - point being, as an open-source project, a portable piece of software, carousel widget showing book covers developed by the developers putting together the SAILS' site
- showed example of CCK3 (CCK allows you to develop "custom content types" - e.g., "videocast")
- John created a content type called "booklist" - could be specific about order, etc. on booklist & it draws in image of book cover (using CCK3) - put in bib #, can choose to add book cover - saves a lot of time
- Drupal allows you to bring all sorts of Drupal tools - jQuery in it, for example
SOPAC & The Physical Library
- how do you take digital experience & bring it into the physical experience?
- screen dedicated to what's going on in library - items just returned show up on screen in library on its "Main St." - can request for staff members to go get them right away from that screen - updates every 10 seconds
- directly from SOPAC data - no reports have to be run
SOPAC 2.1 & Beyond (looking into/developing):
- Twitter integration - reviews, updates, events, overdue notices, requests feedback
- dedicated SOPAC Twitter account - want SOPAC to be able to announce to and listen from Twitter
- playing around with it - figuring out the use case
- Organic Groups - (OG modules in Drupal) - SOPAC can bring people together outside of sphere of influence of librarians - so users can create interest groups on the fly, coupled with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) - what users like/don't like (profiles of users) - yes, there are privacy issues, but figuring out how to do that - so that they can be more proactive in even getting people together
- we don't want to be the end destination for users, we want to help build community
- we have inventory management systems, why don't we have customer relationship management systems?
- schema-less bibliographic data storage (Apache CouchDB - schema-less database) - give libraries the ability to dump anything into db
- iPhone & Droid apps - including distributed self-check (using iPhone camera to scan barcodes, for example)