World Wide Web, OPACs, and Discovery Layers

World Web Web

From it's beginnings on a CERN desktop computer, the World Web Web (WWW) impact on all levels of society has been profound and libraries are still reacting to the introduction of websites, the availablity of information, and important to library systems, user expectations surrounding functionality and interface norms.

Amazon, Google, and Wikipedia

Both Amazon (founded in 1994) and Google (founded in 1998) heavily influnce the expectations of library technology users. Amazon's display of books search results and detailed page views using such user interface conventions as facets to filter results, all impacted the design of library technologies. Google contextual searching was different from the access-points based search of library ILS and provided better search results for many queries that are difficult to replicate in the ILS.

The ongoing success of Wikipedia as a resource built with user-contributed content, forced libraries to reconsider their traditional roles as information gatekeepers.

Amazon Search and Product Pages

Google Search

OPAC

The arrival of "Online Public Access Catalog" or (OPAC) that provided a web-based interface to ILS started in the mid-1990s. Almost immediately, these often primitive OPACS were much more popular among library users than the physical card catalog or first-generation "text-based" catalogs of the 1970s and 1980s. The designs of these early OPACs reflected two different access models, one deeply ground in assumptions and behavior of using the physical card catalog with author, title, and subject access points while other was using console-based information sources like DIALOG.

Example of an OPAC View of Pride and Prejudice

SearchWorks

DLSS's SearchWorks is one of the best implementations of a Discovery environment.

Discovery Layers/Systems

Discovery systems, both open-source ( Blacklight, VuFind) or commercial products like Innovative Interfaces' Encore, Ex Libris Summon, OCLC's WorldCat Local, and Ebsco's Discovery Service. All of these systems attempt to replicate a "Google" like search with puesdo-boolean searches on indexes that include the library's catalog, digital repositories, and purchased and opens-access article index and full-text databases.

Institutional Repositories

Institutional Digital Repositories are a class of software for preserving and accessing digital content. Most library vendors offer commerical institutional repository products with the biggest change was the purchase of Bepress by Elsevier.

The open-source Fedora Repository is the backend digital repository that has two major front-ends; Hydra and Islandora. Stanford Digital Repository uses a legacy version of Fedora to store MODS XML metadata but not for management of the resource bitstreams.

Every year, Marshall Breedings produces a report on library systems that breaks down the major vendors and developments in library technology.

• 1^st May 2018: New technologies enable an expanded vision of library services