Oct

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SOPAC (Social Online Public Access Catalog)

October 2, 2009 |  Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

“SOPAC is a module for the Drupal CMS that provides true integration of your library catalog system with the power of the Drupal content management system while allowing users to tag, rate, and review your holdings. User input is then incorporated into the discovery index so that SOPAC becomes a truly community-driven catalog system.”

With a few clicks of the mouse any library that currently uses Drupal can have an interactive, “community-driven” catalog, similar to Amazon. The program was designed by John Blyberg, who began working on it while employed at the Ann Arbor Library. The first version of SOPAC was a “highly-customized module” that others could play with. Blyberg designed SOPAC2 so that it would be more “distributable”. Librarians will be able to customize every aspect of SOPAC so that their websites will look exactly the way the choose. The Ann Arbor District Library went live with SOPAC2 last month and their catalog can be seen here.

Blyberg now works for the Darien County Library in Conneticut and you can see how that catalog system works by clicking here.

If you want to know more about what to expect from SOPAC2, then look at Blyberg’s article entitled, “SOPAC 2.0: What to Expect”.

SOPAC is an open source software licensed through GNU, which is sponsored by the Free Software Foundation.


Comments



1 Comment so far

  1.    Emily on October 3, 2009 10:01 am

    Thanks for the library site– I am passing it along to my coworkers. I think they are using it in a lot of really great ways…

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