[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Feature inquiry

[Jason Etheridge]

> Yes, the ability to tag should be there.  But make it a feature that can be turned off by those of us who do not want it.

Part of the problem with the "wisdom of the masses" aspect of tagging
is building incentive and getting a critical mass for a network
effect.  Personal tagging has its own incentive, and maybe the
predominantly privacy-conscious librarians will let us set the default
to "Shared" for personal tagging in their libraries, but is it and
will it be enough to kick off the process?  LibraryThing[1] hits the
incentive nail on the head; the whole point there is to catalog your
books.  But that's not the point of _current_ library catalogs (we
need to change that--the library website could be a tool to help you
organize your data rather than merely find data).

This potential lack of incentive and resulting sparseness of data is
one reason why I'm very interested in the SOPAC[2], and more
importantly, its Insurge component (Independent Social Repository).
With Insurge you can share user-contributed data between catalogs and
populations.  So if one library manages to hit upon an incentive for
their population (for example, Oakville and Bibliocommon's Build the
Ultimate Catalog contest[3], if it were not a silo), then everyone
benefits.

Some ideas?

Get the third party open source catalogs working on Evergreen
(VuFind[5], SOPAC, Blacklight[6], etc.).

Get commercial OPAC-related products working on Evergreen
(LibraryThing for Libraries[7], AquaBrowser[8], Endeca[9], etc.).

Many folks have harped on the notion of a "dis-integrated" library
system.  It's a good idea, and it's one reason why we built Evergreen
with a service oriented architecture.  Freedom breeds innovation
(actually, that's a bit of a fib--problems and constraints breed
innovation, but you need the freedom to innovate, to well, innovate,
so it's worth advocating freedom).

Give Evergreen a way to consume the bookbags and RSS feeds it produces.

Try to engage the patron with little sidebar surveys and the like
("Hey, since you last signed in, you have returned these books: xxx,
xxx, xxx.  What did you think of them?")

Participate in the Next Generation Catalog For Libraries (NGC4LIB[10])
mailing list.

[1] - http://www.librarything.com/
[2] - http://www.thesocialopac.net/
[3] - http://opl.bibliocommons.com/info/contest
[5] - http://www.vufind.org/
[6] - http://lib.virginia.edu/digital/resndev/blacklight.html
[7] - http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/
[8] - http://www.aquabrowser.com/
[9] - http://www.endeca.com/
[10] - http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mailing-lists/ngc4lib/

-- 
Jason Etheridge
 | VP, Community Support and Advocacy
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com