BiblioCommons Emerges: “Revolutionary” Social Discovery System for Libraries
Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 7/19/2008
- Offers “easy readers’ advisory”
- System layered on top of ILS
- Users new to social web take to tagging
BilbioCommons, a new social discovery system for libraries that replaces all user-facing OPAC functionality, allowing for faceted searching and easier user commenting and tagging, has gone live in Oakville, ON, a city of 160,000 outside Toronto. It is expected to be used by public libraries serving more than half of Canada’s population—and some libraries in the United States, too. “This is revolutionary, as far as I’m concerned,” Gail Richardson, Oakville PL’s acting director of online services, told LJ. “People don’t want a library that acts like just a glorified card catalog online. They want a catalog that’s as good as Google and Amazon.”
Library users, said Richardson, most want “easy reader’s advisory,” a better way to get recommendations and to connect with people online. Beth Jefferson, BiblioCommons’ founder, told LJ that the system makes it easier for users to comment—not “review”—and tag items wherever they are in the system—a more seamless approach than a product like LibraryThing for Libraries or WorldCat. LibraryThing (in use at the Danbury PL, CT), she said, has “real value, but it puts data into the existing catalog...it doesn’t affect search, fundamentally.”
In BiblioCommons beta testing at several libraries, the top five users who commented and tagged had never participated in “the social web,” Jefferson said. She acknowledged that some functions are not yet implemented in the product, such as excerpts from books, that library users might expect, but said the prime issue is “discovery tools.”
In beta testing, the “check-out” and “recently returned” pages have been the most popular places for user participation, she said. “Enabling users to contribute data doesn’t mean they will,” she said. “We have spent a tremendous amount of time trying to look at what Tim O’Reilly calls the ‘architecture of participation.' "
Beyond that, BiblioCommons libraries have found success with some often unengaged users—termed “Just for Fun” in the recent OCLC report analyzing library support—by offering them a chance to earn credits for adding “a comment, tag, summary, similar title, age suitability, content notice or quotation” or creating a list. Those credits can be used for chances at prizes or perhaps special borrowing privileges.
Moving forward
BiblioCommons has been working with several ILS vendors, notably SirsiDynix. “We have fully integrated with [SirsiDynix’s] Unicorn and Horizon,” Jefferson said, “and just completed integration with [Ex Libris’s] Voyager for Queen’s University” in Kingston, ON. She said BiblioCommons is currently testing with two California libraries, in Palo Alto and in Santa Clara County, with others in the United States under discussion.
Don't expect immediate rollout, however. Jefferson said it will take until later this year for a “critical mass of libraries” to be using BilbioCommons. Various collaborative agreements must be forged, including an architecture that allows commentary from a patron of one BiblioCommons library to be seen in another BiblioCommons library, and a common set of standards.
BiblioCommons, the subject of periodic murmurs around the library world, is a Toronto-based company that began, Jefferson said, looking at a nonprofit youth literacy initiative. A pilot project with the Toronto Public Library prompted a broader look at a library application. Now funded by private investors and subscriptions, BiblioCommons has agreements with Knowledge Ontario (a collaboration of libraries, cultural heritage organizations, and educational institutions), the British Columbia provincial Public Library Services, and The Alberta Library, a provincial consortium that will highlight BiblioCommons service at the Edmonton Public Library. That makes for a population base of some 20 million, well over half of the country’s 33.2 million total.
The BiblioCommons web site, for now, is just one page, and the 12-person company has not exhibited at library conferences. “We really wanted to focus on getting a product that was right and working, before we took it out,” Jefferson said. Also, she said, “We’d like to document some of the research to really encourage a faster pace of innovation."
