Endeca’s ProFind is the “engine” behind things like World Book, the Barnes & Noble “Bookfinder” service, and a number of other systems. Today I visited a library OPAC (North Carolina State University) that’s using Endeca’s search software (a first?) and it really does raise the bar on how an OPAC ought to function and what it ought to look like:
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/
Beyond the really nice (clean) look of this OPAC, what I immediately notice is that you can actually browse around for things—hey, that’s different. Clearly the current generation of OPACs was designed for “known item searching” and browsing was just an afterthought. This Endeca-powered OPAC shows a great deal of context around a browse and with a few clicks you can make much better progress through the collection.
Of course, the power of this “browse” feature also reveals some problems with LC classification. For example, I thought I’d browse for computer books so I clicked on “Technology” but that didn’t work. The “T – Technology” meant, the T classification, so lot’s of engineering books but nothing on computers. Knowing a bit about LC classification, I backed up and selected “Q – Science”. Finally got there but only because I knew I was really looking for QA 76 (and knew to click on the QA1-QA939 Mathematics link which then revealed the QA71-QA90 “Instruments and Machines” section). Bad Metadata In—Bad Browsing Out.
Those problems aside, an example of this sort of power in an OPAC should help move the genre forward…