Here, from library systems expert Casey Bisson. How to make catalogs come alive with user comments on books–and other extras? Librarians are already experimenting with this idea, but Casey has a new angle: the concept of bridging the gap between the library and the WordPress open source community. Excerpt:
What is WPopac? It’s an OPAC–a library catalog, for my readers outside libraries–inside the framework of WordPress, the hugely popular blog management application.
Why misuse WordPress that way? WordPress has a a few things we care about built-in: permalinks, comments, and trackbacks (and a good comment spam filter), just to start. But it also offers something we’ve never seen in a library application before: access to a community of knowledge, programmers, and designers outside libraries. Because the core of WPopac is WordPress, and because it preserves WordPress’s rich plugin API and themes structure, it already has more users, designers, developers, and administrators than all the ILS vendors combined.
