MSNBC ran a piece on September 16th about Innovative Interfaces‘ new dynamic catalog platform, Encore. Innovative’s CEO Jerry Kline is quoted saying “it’s for libraries that want to compete effectively on the Web and give the best access possible to the books, images and full-text electronic articles in their collection.” This ostensibly means offering integrated search and retrieval and social features such as tagging and reviewing through an interface that resembles Amazon, Ebay, etc. An example of the Encore platform from the University of Kentucky Libraries:
Hopefully, this and other new catalog iterations (such as Aquabrowser or the open-source Endeca) will address the variety of book-centric, effort duplicating, patron-unfocused issues of traditional OPACs cited by K.G. Schneider and countless others.
For a comprehensive look at these and other enhanced OPACs take a look at Marshall Breeding’s recent Next-Generation Library Catalogs from ALA TechSource Library Technology Reports.
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