OPAC 2.0

With the rise of Google, Amazon, Wikipedia and more, there is an oft-stated fear that many users, much of the time, will bypass processes and institutions that they perceive to be slow, unresponsive, unappealing and irrelevant in favor of a more direct approach to services offered by others that just might be 'good enough' for what they need to do (Miller, P., 2005).

The online public access catalog or OPAC has receive considerable attention in Library 2.0 literature and indeed could represent both the greatest challenge and greatest innovation to come out of the discipline. Karen Coyle points out that a mere 1% of users begin their information search in the library catalog and that users tend to only refer to the catalog when they expect that what they are looking for can be found in the library (Coyle, K. 2007, 290). Why? It might be that OPACs tend toward "slow, unresponsive, unappealing and irrelevant". These points have not gone unnoticed. Library 2.0 envisions what Sarah Houghton and others have described as an 'OPAC that doesn't suck' (Houghton, S., 2005). The next generation OPAC can be described by the following formula:

"Browser + Web 2.0 applications + connectivity = full-featured OPAC" (Curran, K., et al., 2007, 292)

The OPAC 2.0 will have embedded in it features that enhance usability. Advocates want vendors to open up their OPAC software to allow local programmers to customize their systems and mash up their catalog with other applications. Users will be able to tag catalog entries essentially establishing an organic, parallel cataloging system based on their own collective wisdom. And the OPAC 2.0 will generate recommendations and allow users to rate books and other media and add their reviews. Maness even suggests that digital reference functionality could be built right in to OPACs offering users a synchronous chat reference session with a librarian as they search. A system could detect certain repetitive patterns that may indicate that a user requires assistance prompting assistance automatically (Maness, J. 2006, 141). In OPAC 2.0 usability is necessarily enhanced as users themselves shape the process of information retrieval.