Superpatron

AADL planning SOPAC 2 beta for in-building use

If you are inside an Ann Arbor District Library building, you have access to an early beta of the new catalog.

By "early" I really mean "early" - there's no pretenses that it's finished, but it is up and running with catalog data, though the skin on it is completely bog-standard unvarnished Drupal that makes you want to sing the Drupal song.

One thing I notice right away is that there's a faceted search, so that you can sift through query results by date, language, or materials type.  I'm sure there will be more to discover as time goes on.

AADL planning SOPAC 2 release in early 2009

One reason that you should send in comments through the library comment form: you get heads up on new development.  From Eli Neiburger in mail:

Hey, Ed, thanks for passing this along. The III catalog does not handle unicode very well as you can see; this should be resolved with SOPAC 2 which we plan to roll out in early 2009. We won't be using III's catalog results anymore; results will come from a Sphinx search of harvested bib records. Stay tuned!

Eli notes that there is a working version of the new catalog (very rough) available for preview, but the way the network address for it is routed it's only available in the building.  That is an effective way to show what's going on - and I'll post again next week on Tuesday to show what I've found out since then.  Some background reading for you and for me until then:

John Blyberg, SOPAC 2.0: What to Expect, August 2008.

On September 1st, Darien Library will go live with a new web site. We will also be going live with SOPAC version 2.0. In case you’ve been wondering why I don’t blog anymore, it’s because of 2.0. It’s been a massive project.

John Blyberg, SOPAC 2 Released, September 2008

So, I may have been a little ambitious when I thought I could get SOPAC2, Locum, and Insurge released within a week of launching the new darienlibrary.org.  But I can now finally say that SOPAC2 is officially released and a new project website launched.

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

The Social OPAC

Thesocialopac.net is the official website of the Social OPAC application suite--an open source social discovery platform for bibliographic data. The purpose of this site is to build a cohesive community of users and developers around the SOPAC project suite.

YourLibrarySite to Offer SOPAC Integration

Some very good news from Eugene, Oregon! Drupal web design firm Craftyspace is going to integrate SOPAC into their YourLibrarySite product suite. This means that they will be offering their expertise to implement and support SOPAC in your organization.

I'm sure there's more; look for another post next week (starting to write it now...)