Access 2007, Part 2
The morning of Saturday 13 October 2007, the end of Access 2007, was a comparative hotbed of FRBR activity compared to the previous days: your favourite IFLA-created entity-relationship model for organizing bibliographic entities, and mine, was mentioned twice.
Peter Binkley gave a talk called “Searching the OPAC: The State of Play.” “In the past few years libraries have started to take action on their dissatisfaction (and their users’ indifference) towards their OPACs. The concurrent emergence of options for search interfaces outside the ILS and the wide adoption of Web 2.0 applications by our users have provided both a carrot and a stick. This session will examine the current range of possibilities for improving search functionalities in, around and begainst the OPAC.” (Begainst!?) He mentioned FRBR as part of “clumping,” one of the things catalogues do to help users. It was a good overview of where things are at in catalogues and what new things are being done.
Right after that was Joshua Ferraro, president of LibLime, with “Open Source Software as a Service.” He talked about his company, open source in libraries, Koha, how buying support for open source applications work, etc. (There had been a lot of talk at the conference about Evergreen, so it was good everyone got a chance to hear about Koha too.) He said one Koha-using system was using OCLC’s xISBN to bring together different manifestations of the same work. I think the example he showed was the Athens County Public Libraries in Ohio. That link will show you Hamlet, with an Editions tab.
Another thing of interest was a demo of a digitized scrapbook. Here are some rough notes about it for the conference, here’s a link to the digitized Dodds scrapbook, and here’s Scraps, the tool used to do it all. The Image Markup Tool is a Windows app where users can mark out boxes on images and add metadata. It’s very impressive, and the talk was great. I mention this because while they were showing the scrapbook, I thought, “By Jove, FRBRizing this thing would be a hell of a job. I wonder what the Working Group on Aggregates would make of this.”