Moving from “bolt-on OPAC’s” to “plug-in OPAC’s”

The folks at TALIS continue to come up with interesting topics for their monthly Library Gang podcasts. This month’s subject was that of Bolt-on OPAC’s those search and discovery tools from both the open source community and proprietary vendors that get installed on top of the existing (and usually different) ILS product.

As I say in the podcast, I think the folks at Aquabrowser deserve a lot of credit here for really shaking up library and vendor thinking about the approach to be taken. Taco Ekkel the Director of Development for Medialab Solutions, who produced Aquabrowser, is guest in this podcast and provides a great deal of background on how the product and how it came to be offered to the library marketplace.

The bottom line on what we’re seeing here is an important development in library automation, where libraries are being provided more choices in meeting the needs of their users and their institutions. While we’ve had some degree of add-on software from other vendors for back-room operations in the past, with this development we’re seeing choices being enabled for user facing modules. This will require more work on the part of vendors to fully enable the functionality of these modules, but the signs here are good and with the professions adoption and encouragement of these new choices, vendors will respond with more enabling support. In my opinion, we still have more to do to move from “bolt-on OPAC’s” to “plug-in OPAC’s”. There are lots of issues to be overcome and many of those get discussed as well.

It’s an interesting podcast and I encourage you to take 45 minutes to listen to it.