After a long summer, the new DarienLibrary.org went live this morning.  The new website is running Drupal 6 and SOPAC 2.0.

Josh Hadro has written a very nice article about the particulars of the new social catalog application suite, and Richard Wallis has posted a podcast of a conversation I had with him last week about it.

We’re lucky to have such a great staff here in Darien, all of whom have put a huge amount of effort to making the new site a success.  Thanks guys!

And now, it’s time for a nap!

On September 1st, Darien Library will go live with a new web site.  We will also be going live with SOPAC version 2.0.  In case you’ve been wondering why I don’t blog anymore, it’s because of 2.0.  It’s been a massive project.

As you probably know, SOPAC 1.0 was written for the Ann Arbor District Library catalog while I was working there. It was, however, a collection of ‘hacks’ that I made in order to get that functionality working within the Drupal framework of aadl.org.  I did release the 1.0 code but as I said at the time, it would “definitely not work out-of-the-box”.  It was a highly-customized module made available so that other developers could play with it.

When I began work on SOPAC 2.0, I kept two prime directives in mind.  First, it had to have the potential to work with any ILS.  Second,  it had to be a highly-configurable, distributable package.  In other words, it has been completely rewritten from the ground-up to be a real software “product”.  This will be a project that is managed and maintained by Darien Library.  We will make the beta available under GPLv3 once we get our legs back under us after Sept 1st.

How it Works

SOPAC 2.0 itself is a non-trivial project. It is an expansive Drupal module that completely integrates all online catalog and patron activity.  It is written for Drupal 6 and takes exclusive advantage of Drupal 6’s hooks and APIs.  The result is that it is 100% theme-able and template-able.  You will be able to make your catalog look exactly the way you want it to look without exception.  Virtually every element of the patron account integration is also configurable.

In order to make SOPAC 2.0 possible, however, I’ve decided to create two software libraries that operate independently of each other.  The first, Locum, provides a catalog discovery layer as well as ILS-independent abstraction for all catalog-related activity.  It can be used by any PHP application, not just SOPAC.  So, for example, you could ostensibly port SOPAC to Joomla using Locum as the sublayer.  Locum allows developers to “drop in” connector pieces for their own ILS.  Locum (and anything built on top of it) doesn’t care if you are a III library or a SirsiDynix library or a Koha library.

The second software library, Insurge (Independent Social Repository), is in response to my feelings about the inadequacy of local, community-driven social data.  On one hand, I recognize the value and importance of highlighting local social data, but for the purposes of search and content discovery, it’s just not a large enough data-set.

My original intent was to store all the social data within the Drupal database (as it is in SOPAC 1), but I was not terribly thrilled with that prospect, so I began to envision a second abstraction that was dedicated just to bibliographic social data and which could be shared, freely, between different institutions.  In addition to our own tags and reviews, we can choose which other libraries we want to pull social data from.  We would, in turn, sync up our new data so that other libraries could download and use it. In this way,we have the opportunity to “highlight” our own local reviews and tags while taking advantage of a larger pool of data.  The best of both worlds.

Naturally, there are many nuances and complexities involved in all this and we will be launching a dedicated site for the product suite that will allow users and developers to start building a support base.

I’m sure there will be a myriad of questions and I will answer them as I can but if I don’t reply to your email or comment right away it’s because September 1st is closing in fast and it’s two weeks and two days to bingo time.

After such a long hiatus from blogging, I feel like I owe it to those of you who are still subscribed to explain my absence.

In short, I’m busy.

We’re building a new library which will open in January (watch the time-lapse construction videos!). Of course, that’s not enough to do, so we’re launching our new website on September 1st, which gives me… well, not very much time to myself these days.

It was just about a year ago that I started working at Darien Library. The construction site was little more than a razed patch of dirt. It’s now something quite different. When it’s done, it will be quite clear that there has never been a library built quite like this one. From rethinking our entire classification system to planning how to use a building that is wired to the hilt, to an RFID conversion, to a major web redesign, to some other things yet-to-be-announced, we’re about to enter a period of serious metamorphosis.

So, I’ve put this blog on a slow burn while I tend to a few other things.

David Weinberger had some interesting comments at ROFLcon on the nature of “fame” and Web 2.0. He says, “perfection is the enemy of credibility” from which I’m led to conclude that we ought to be engaged in the pursuit of credibility, not perfection. But I have to say that in the analysis of what is ‘less perfect’ and ‘more credible’, I begin to see a pursuit of what can really only be described as ‘more perfectly imperfect.’ In other words, imperfection is a style toward which many content creators strive. Content is only credible if it’s imperfect in the right way.

via Rocketboom, here’s Weinburger:

The Darien Library debuts on YouTube with four new videos of a growing library. Be sure to check out and subscribe to our channel for more videos like this: