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The “OPAC doesn’t do like Amazon/Google” problem

November 13, 2006 at 10:55 am · Filed under Library 2.0, rants

This conundrum has sprung up over and over when any one discusses OPACs. It is a valid question/issue. However, it is something that really must be examined within the context in which this problem evolved. So since we are comparing Amazon, Google, and the OPAC together a little history (for the sake of brevity I am only going to use the top two ILS vendors in this little rant):

  • Amazon launched in 1995 (important note: Amazon didn’t make its first annual profit until 2003)
  • Google began in 1998.
  • Sirsi was founded in 1979 (Dynix was founded in 1983)
  • Innovative Interfaces was founded in 1979

You could pretty much say that the Online Public Access Catalog began about the same time as Amazon, right around the time this crazy internet thing started to make sense in an applied model to:

  1. Make Money
  2. Connect with customers remotely

Amazon and Google are chasing the consumers dollars. It behooves both giants to make sure you find what you are looking for. Really, Google and Amazon want you to find something or anything remotely close to what you are looking for, because that increases the likely hood that you will buy something or follow an ad to buy something. For the OPAC it is trying to find you what you want, and exactly what you want.

This “exactly” part falls squarely in the purview of librarians. The behavior of the OPAC search has been dictated to vendors by their customers. It seems to me that in the beginning Librarians purchased ILS that made the most sense for THEM, not the users. No librarian, especially a catalog librarian, would have purchased a system that allowed you to misspell an author and still return that authors works! The notion of user centered design had not really come to practical fruition yet.

Even in the beginning Amazon and Google were not the seamless smooth purveyors of quality user interaction goodness that they are now. It has been a long and winding road to get where we are today. Indeed, to get where we are has taken lots, and lots of money! The ILS vendors also spend lots and lots of money improving their software, their search, their interfaces, really every aspect of their product. The big difference between the ILS guys and the Amazon-Google guys: product versus service. In general, the Amazon-Google guys’ software is a service, they are never selling their software to people, people go to their web site and use it. The ILS is selling a software product. Which means their software has to be made in such a way the the customer likes what it does enough to spend lots of money on it. While the OPAC is an important part, it is not the ONLY part of the ILS.

The OPAC is the face that the patrons see however, and this is where the convergence of web giants and small libraries occurs and the “OPAC doesn’t do like Amazon/Google” problem arises. Now that more people use the web, and Amazon and Google have become fixtures on the web and cornerstones in the everyday life of web users, when someone goes to a library site they expect it to perform just like Amazon or Google. Well sorry chief, it ain’t gonna work that way! I truly wish it did, and quite frankly, many of the better companies in the ILS world are fast at work making products that do.But again wihsihng that the OPAC and Googlezon worked the same just doesn’t mesh with the contextual development of the OPAC and the librarians who would ultimately purchase the ILS/OPAC software. The librarians and libraries thought of their own use cases, ideas, and preferences rather than of users needs. Now by the successes of similar web applications such as Amazon and Google the focus is being placed back where it should have been from the beginning, on user experience. Librarians are starting to complain about their OPACs to their vendors, and thus the whole “my OPAC sucks” meme was born (and there could be a whole other discussion of the OPAC sucks stuff in regards to how it looks versus this posts topic of how it works).

But here is the kicker, and really the great hypocrisy that was by and large the biggest impetus for my little blog here, the complaining librarians often forget that the way the OPAC works is the way THEY asked for it to work! So the vendors are hard at work developing new products to satisfy the librarians new focus on the user. The funny thing is that all of the ILS vendors could indeed produce something as good as Amazon and Google, but no library would buy them…

A small footnote: The whole OPACS suck meme does seem to be spouted by more of the lower level or newer librarians (read no decision making or purchasing power), and as such it is hard to really give them a whole lot of weight. But these librarians are the ones who have more contact with the patrons so their complaints are valid. Also, one day these librarians may be the ones with the decision making and purchasing power and as such ILS vendors should at least pay some attention. But please for the sake of all that is holy will you OPAC sucks people who complain about how the OPAC looks get off your asses and either hire a REAL web designer or stop wasting your time posting to your blog and develop the design skills to fix the problem you are bitching about!

walt crawford said,

November 13, 2006 @ 12:14 pm

“You could pretty much say that the Online Public Access Catalog began about the same time as Amazon”

1979=1995? In Internet time? Really?

ILS vendors go back at least a decade prior to 1979, but I won’t argue with the date for OPACs–but still, 1979 is a LONG time before 1995.

I won’t get into the meat of the discussion, for a variety of reasons (conflict of interest, self-preservation…)

Opacula said,

November 13, 2006 @ 1:53 pm

Again I guess I need to be a little more specific. There really wasn’t much of an OPAC in the modern “webified” sense of the term. So in that scope really when the web took off, right around 1995, you saw the beginning of the modern OPAC. Yes, I will admit I am pretty much dismissing Telnet and the whole character based catalog. I was simply using OPAC in the way I see the “OPAC sucks” people talking about the http / https protocol served up html documents. So no 1979 does not equal 1995, and I know other ILS vendors were around even earlier but in the pursuit of brevity I picked the top two vendors today.

alt-tabbing librarian said,

November 14, 2006 @ 9:09 am

In some ways I agree with you… it seems to me that ILS have been developed with emphasis on the back-end, the subscription and cataloging functions (ie. those interfaces the librarians would be more likely to use) than the front-end (search) interface. And I definitely agree with you that the catalogue is a librarian-centric tool, rather than a library-users based tool.

However, there are a number of times I’ve used say, a journal subscription/circulation function in an ILS and it clearly lacks functionality which a librarian would put in - little things like sorting received journal by date, so newest journals are added last on the list, rather than first, which involved copius amounts of [next] clicks. To me this indicates there is room for much more consultation on ILS products during their development with librarians that will be using the product on a day to day basis to get these kinds of things right. It also seems to me that you’re putting a lot of emphasis on librarians telling you what they want in a product - fair enough to a certain degree - but as developers shouldn’t you be taking some of this onus on yourselves, develop new functionality and get librarian’s excited about new ways of doing things.

I also agree that there is a lot more room for libraries to be employing web developers/designers in house to work on their OPAC (I really hate that term btw) interfaces, as I’m sure ILS developers do build in a lot of customisation that a lot of less well funded libraries simply can’t take advantage of, because they don’t have the expertise in house.

Response to : The “OPAC doesn’t do like Amazon/Google” problem « alt+tab+lib said,

November 22, 2006 @ 10:53 am

[…] I posted a response to Opacula’s recent post The “OPAC doesn’t do like Amazon/Google” problem. My comment covers what I think really, but I can totally see where Opacula is coming from with this. […]

Jesse said,

December 12, 2006 @ 12:40 pm

“The funny thing is that all of the ILS vendors could indeed produce something as good as Amazon and Google, but no library would buy them”

I doubt they could, to be honest. Amazon and Google have very large programming and design staffs, including a number of people with very specialized skills. ILS vendors have much more limited resources. They also have a much slower development cycle, since they are producing commercial software that is typically loaded on the clients’ machines (as opposed to web-based services like Amazon and Google). They also don’t offer APIs, which would be invaluable to many libraries.

“But please for the sake of all that is holy will you OPAC sucks people who complain about how the OPAC looks get off your asses and either hire a REAL web designer or stop wasting your time posting to your blog and develop the design skills to fix the problem you are bitching about!”

There are several people out there who are doing that. We recently purchased Polaris specifically because it is easy for me to get into the guts of the system and modify the existing code (I was a programmer for 10 years). Since the system runs on APS.NET, C#, MS SQL 5.0, and XML, I can pretty much tear it apart and rebuild it the way I want to. The new website the city is developing will run on the same basic platform, so I will be able to integrate the two with little difficulty.

Let’s face it, though - OPACs DO suck. From both technical and general use perspectives I have yet to see one that I would call a really good piece of software. Many of them are still running on very old, clunky code that has simply been patched over the years. If you look at business software in general - particularly stuff in the same price range - the difference in quality is astounding. ILS systems are essentially inventory control and sales programs (when you get down to the basic functions), yet none of them can even begin to compare to the ones that mid-sized to large businesses use.

- Jesse

frustratedvendor said,

May 24, 2008 @ 8:17 pm

Check out the Polaris OPAC. It has the faceted searching that Amazon has and it has several gooleesque features i.e. Did You Mean Spell Checkering. Try www.faylib.org. I”m not sure what else your looking for when you say that OPAC’s suck. I’m sure there is some things that Polaris does not have but it has several features that youare asking for. By the way it also has patron reviews and ratings via Chilifresh.

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