http://libcat.mcmaster.ca/index.jsp?sid=1183C576597F&Tab=1

This is his additional comment:

‘What you see is the advanced search. I know I am from the old school but this doesn’t appear very advanced to me.

Indeed. I can’t tell which is Endeca or which is Horizon here either. Nonetheless I quite liked the Browse tab, which gives you search results as soon as you click on the tab. I wonder how it decides which results to present at this most general level …

I’m off to an AB launch at Croydon in a couple of weeks time.

I’ve found at least 1 other thingy that offers graphical navigation through tags, although I can’t remember what it is at the moment. I’ll post here (if I can remember how) if I find it again.

According to my sources, (other Sirsi library) people are also thinking about (lifted from email):

‘a) Third party commercial front-ends (e.g. Endecca, Primo, Worldcat, Local, Bibliocommons)

‘b) Open Source front end (e.g. VuFind)

‘c) Sirsi’s Next Solutions (Is there something in the works? Any sense of a release date, more importantly any sense of when it (or EPS) will be truly functional?)’

So Sirsi Next doesn’t seem to be around yet; EPS doesn’t work (and neither did the old Openly (1cate)-based Rooms).

We know about Endeca, and presumably also Primo and Worldcat. Bibliocommons (http://bibliocommons.com/), described as a library socuial networking site, people seem interested in, but unfortunately it’s home page currently isn’t terribly forthcoming.

Could something like LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/), lib social networking, be of interest?

I just had a quick look at VuFind (http://www.vufind.org/). It appears to support COINs so I was seeing lots of QM SFX buttons everywhere; there are the (what seems to be these days) usual facets and categories; there’s some nascent exploration of tags although these didn’t seem to be working in the demo (‘browse the catalogue’ at bottom); &c.

VuFind is open source; there are increasing others:

- Evergreen (http://www.open-ils.org/)
- Koha (http://www.koha.org/)
- Emilda (http://www.emilda.org/)
- Openbiblio (http://sourceforge.net/projects/obiblio/)

seem to be among the best known.

I’ll post more as I happen on it, but must dash now – train to catch!

Jeremy

http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/next-generation-library-catalogs.html

However, I would like to look more closely at what such a package could do for a reasearch library of our size. Endeka are shooting a lot of functionality at their potential clients and this always tempts me to pull it apart and analyse all its constituents individually. There are many elements I recognize here, from what I have seen in demonstrations and seminars, that have been exploited sigualarly in UK university OPACs. For instance, in an earlier post, I metioned Dave Pattern, an OPAC developer from Huddersfield has already implemented spell correction features, inspired by old techniques used by Amazon. How he did this and at what cost would be worth invesitigating.

So firstly, pull what’s on offer at endeka apart, work out what’s useful for this library and then we can evalute it with other products or in house solutions.

Jason Rakowski