Last night DLTJ was upgraded to WordPress 2.3. As far as I can tell, everything is working okay, but please let me know in the comments or the comment form if something doesn’t seem right. There were two tricky parts to the upgrade. (Well, three really, if you count the tasks necessary to extract the reminants of the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) from the theme.) Fortunately, one of them was not the upgrade itself; after abandoning the Gentoo portage ebuild for WordPress, I switched to the Subversion update method. This was the first time I did an ‘svn switch‘ to get the new version, and it worked great.

The first is dealing with the new tag infrastructure in Worpress 2.3. For those that read DLTJ via the website (as opposed to reading it through the RSS feed exclusively), you know that at the bottom of each posting is a table of tags with links to postings in DLTJ as well as links to items with similar tags in Technorati, del.icio.us, and a search for the tag in the english Wikipedia. Previously I had hacked UTW to provide that format, but without UTW available I bit the bullet and created a simple plug-in to create the table. It was my first plug-in for WordPress and I was quite proud of myself right up to the point where I couldn’t figure out why the table wasn’t appearing when the plug-in was enabled. So I went into a recent post to verify the tags and saw that the problem wasn’t with my plug-in — the problem was that there were no tags in the posting! It seems that I had missed the step of importing the UTW tags into the new WordPress 2.3 tag structure. I finally found out about it via the WordPress support forums, so here is a clue for those attempting the same thing — you’ll find utilities for importing tags in the…wait for it…import admin page. It would have been nice if the “/wp-admin/upgrade.php” utility saw that I was using a previous tagging system and pointed me in the direction of the import utility.

The second problem was easier to solve, and that was the missing functionality of Extended Live Archive on the DLTJ homepage. Fortunately, someone went through the effort of figuring out what needed to be changed in Extended Live Archive to accomodate the tag structure and published the results. I don’t like how the tag page doesn’t follow the common practice of font sizes based on popularity of the use of the tag, but I can get along without it. The built-in “tag cloud” functionality does a nice job of doing that.

Schemes to add functionality to the web OPAC fall into four categories: web OPAC enhancements, web OPAC wrappers, web OPAC replacements, and integrated library system replacements. I’m outlining these four techniques in a report I’m editing for an OhioLINK strategic task force and a bit of a reality check on this categorization is desired, so if I’m missing anything big (conceptually or announcements of projects/products that fall into these categories), please let me know in the comments. Generally speaking, this list is ordered by cost/complexity to implement — from lowest to highest — as well as the ability to offer the described enhanced services from least likely to most likely.

Web OPAC enhancements are functions that are added to the existing web OPAC system. This most often entails additional product purchases from the automation vendor, such as the optional enhancements in WebPAC Pro for Millennium OPACs or content solutions in SirsiDynix. Enhancement can also be added through creative use of an existing web OPAC’s template functions, such as the method by which LibraryThing for Libraries can be added to OPAC displays.

Web OPAC wrappers use the existing web OPAC provided by the integrated library system as a source of information, but hide that information behind a completely new interface. The intervening system get that information from the integrated library system through a variety of mechanism. In some cases, it may be possible to use established protocols (such as Z39.50) or programming interfaces (such as an XML content server). In cases where such functionality is not available from the underlying integrated library system, a “screen-scraping HTML” technique may be required. ¹

One example of such a wrapper is the work at Ann Arbor Public Library on SOPAC. Short for “Social OPAC,” SOPAC is “a set of social networking tools integrated into the AADL catalog [that] gives users the ability to rate, review, comment-on, and tag items.”² It uses an open source content management system called Drupal as a structure through which the added functionality is provided. For example, when a user seeks the bibliographic information page for a catalog record, that request is made from the user’s browser to the Drupal software. The Drupal software in turn makes a request to the integrated library system for the bibliographic information it holds. The response from the ILS is parsed by the Drupal software for key information such as title, author, subjects, holdings, etc. This information is mixed with information stored in the Drupal database (ratings, tags, reviews, cover images, etc.) and a new web page is created and returned to the user’s browser.

Another example of a web OPAC wrapper is Scriblio (formerly called WPopac). Using the underlying framework of WordPress, Scriblio offers faceted browsing, tagging, and syndication feeds for the underlying Millennium WebOPAC. Scriblio is a project of Plymouth State University, supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Both SOPAC and Scriblio are available under open source licenses.

Web OPAC replacements are new systems that completely replace the existing web OPAC. Unlike wrappers (which get their bibliographic data in real-time from the underlying web OPAC), these replacements operate on sets of records that are extracted from the ILS or come from another source. (In some cases, these replacements still rely on the underlying web OPAC as a source of item status information such as checked out status and due date.) The first notable OPAC replacement was at North Carolina State University when its library installed and configured the Endeca software to provide a faceted browse to the library catalog. By itself, an Endeca OPAC display does not enable tagging, annotation, or user aggregation services such as recommendation engines.  Other similar web OPAC replacements are Encore from Innovative Interfaces³, Primo from Ex Libris and Aquabrowser from Medialab Solutions. Miami University’s experiments with the open source Apache SOLR and the exported records from their Millennium system also fall into this category. Worldcat Local is also a form of web OPAC replacement noting that the source of bibliographic records is the OCLC Worldcat database rather than the local ILS.

ILS replacements offer the biggest opportunity for enhanced user services, particularly by adopting one of the open source solutions now available. At this time, neither of the open source solutions (Evergreen and Koha) offers more than faceted search and browsing. Unlike the commercial systems, however, the source code of the system can be modified to add these functions, and the modifications shared with other users of the same system.

[Update 20071015T1624 : Corrections made -- and the text improved! -- based on Betsy Graham's comment. Thanks, Betsy!]

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.iii.com/mill/webopac.shtml to http://web.archive.org/web/20071015145500/http://iii.com/mill/webopac.shtml on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.iii.com/encore/main_index2.html to http://web.archive.org/web/20080328163000/http://www.iii.com/encore/main_index2.html on January 20th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.sirsidynix.com/Solutions/Products/portalsearch.php#content to http://web.archive.org/web/20071109170053/http://www.sirsidynix.com/Solutions/Products/portalsearch.php#content on January 28th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. Such a technique gets the information from the ILS using the existing web OPAC. Such schemes are generally fragile because changes to the underlying web OPAC can have detrimental affects on the content scraping process.
2. Blyberg, J. (2007). AADL.org Goes Social. blyberg.net. Retrieved October 12, 2007, from http://www.blyberg.net/2007/01/21/aadlorg-goes-social/
3. As Betsy Graham, Vice President of Product Management at Innovative Interfaces, notes in the comments, the Encore will perform real-time queries to a Millennium ILS for bibliographic data, and in such cases the data extract is not needed.

Has anyone else started seeing what looks to be faceted topical headings at the top of Google searches? This past weekend I was the groomsman at my brother’s wedding and had the unfortunate timing to catch a case of conjunctivitis in both eyes the day before the ceremony. (“Does your camera have red-eye reduction setting?” I asked the photographer. She seemed confused, so I continued: “How about pink-eye reduction?” She looked a little closer at my eyes, laughed, and said “That’s what Photoshop is for.”) Wanting to know more, I did what any self-respecting information-finder would do — I asked Google. And here’s what came up.

Google Search Results for "Conjunctivitis" showing a “Refine results” heading

“Refine results”? Where did that come from?

Google Search Results for "Conjunctivitis" refined by the “Treatment” link.

Here we see a “more:” modifier in the single search box. So where did this “Labeled” metadata coming from? Is Google running algorithms against the search index (similar to Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases) to pull out this kind of faceted information?

Can anyone help sort this out?

I seem to remember, in the early heady days of the internet, there was a cry from the library profession to “Catalog the Internet” — to create descriptive records and controlled vocabularies for every resource out there deemed useful. The early Yahoo!, with a librarian on the staff, was going to help by putting everything in a neat, orderly classification system. The rest of us were going to catalog sites like mad and put them all into WorldCat (and keep them up-to-date). A nice dream.

Looking back, we can probably guess the reasons why this dream isn’t reality today: ill-suited classification schemes, sites that defy classification, etc. I think the real killer, though, was that we thought we could do it ourselves. But you know what? There is too many of “them” creating content on the internet and not enough of “us” to keep up.

I was reminded of this history as a I read a “HOWTO” called “Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging: How to mark sites so you and others can find them” found via an LISnews posting. Written by non-librarians (presumably) for a non-librarian audience, it describes a “collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links.” Sounds reasonable enough, yes? After all, as a profession we just need to step in and give them LCSH ¹ as a “open-ended labeling system”, right?

Nope, the next sentence of the article reads: “Tagging lets you categorize information online your way.”

What?!? Their way? No way! We’ve got things like MARC, AACR, Dewey, and LCSH that have taken us decades to build. We know how to do this better than anyone else, so y’all just sit back and let us do our jobs. ²

But in the grand tradition of the history of the internet, collectively its users routed around failure. ³ And here it is done in grand fashion with 13 recommendations for user-supplied, globally recognized tagging:

1. Be a lemming.
2. Follow the herd.
3. Avoid camels.
4. Like nature, del.icio.us abhors a vacuum.
5. Punctuate with care.
6. Independence is a virtue.
7. Hang out at crossroads.
8. Co-ordinate your efforts.
9. Tags are written in pencil.
10. Bonus tip for Mac users: the Cocoalicious client.
11. On del.icio.us, everyone knows you’re a dog.
12. Shh! This one’s for:you.
13. Spread the word.

Is it a perfect system? No — and one could pick at the many faults.

Does it work? Arguably, well, yes.

Update (20080404T2147) : Update link to “Thirteen Tips…”

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.loc.gov/cds/lcsh.html to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Subject_Headings on November 17th, 2010.

The text was modified to update a link from http://lisnews.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/05/125239 to http://lisnews.org/node/18783 on January 13th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. I couldn’t help but laugh when I read the big news for the 2006 edition of LCSH: “BONUS! Includes Free-floating Subdivisions as a separate section in Volume I.” Hurray!
2. In the words of Michael Gorman, “I have spent a lot of my long professional life working on aspects of the noble aim of Universal Bibliographic Control—a mechanism by which all the world’s recorded knowledge would be known, and available, to the people of the world.” I offer that this excerpt resonates with many in the library profession today, and that we think we can still build a system of Universal Bibliographic Control that will be so good everyone else will obviously adopt it.
3. One of the strengths of the internet is its capacity to “route around” failure, as explained in this piece from “NCSA’s Looking Back On Three Decades Of Internet History“:
   

   But in the early 1960′s, researchers began to realize that a computer network would be much less vulnerable to failure if it was more widely spread out — less like the air travel system than like the network of back roads weaving together every municipality in the country. Each point is connected to its nearest neighbors by several redundant paths. If a connecting node between A and B fails, it is easy to find an alternative route.