I am curious if the card catalogue is a better example of a consistent
OPAC interface or a common index structure. What if the ILS folks of all
stripes concentrated on a strategy for a common index format and some
good hooks for: a) synchronizing multiple copies of the catalogue, and b)
streamlining conduit for passing temporal information like current
availability? Then maybe the interface could be skinnable and flexible,
and the men and women working behind the ILS could concentrate on the
inventory side of the business, which is still what sells a lot of systems
and keeps them afloat. What I think is exciting right now is that there is
some convergence towards Lucene as a common indexer. That is not to say
Lucene is without issues, but at least it's open and there is a global
audience of developers who are thinking about how to make it better.
I can't imagine defining an interface that will please everyone, but I
suspect a mobile and flexible mechanism for establishing rights
management, like I think Eric Hellman suggested way back, is a big part of
the OPAC's future, and technologies like Lucene have a big role here. If
nothing else, an open index with publically discernible algorithms has the
potential to be plugged in to a lot of places, from producing catalogue
cards all over again, right through to the kind of human-computer
interaction that the game industry pursues, like maybe defining an EEG
option to dynamically change search results based on whether a patron is
thinking happy thoughts or a device to emit unique odors for each item
since sense of smell taps into the lowest levels of recall for mammals.
And we think Amazon is leading edge...
art
Received on Thu Jun 15 2006 - 12:34:56 EDT