After much anticipation, version 2.0 of the Social Opac (SOPAC) went live this morning at the Darien Library in Connecticut.
It looks very good… excellent, in fact. I am already looking forward to playing with this version of the software. What I really like at first glance:
- It was created with everyone in mind: in theory can be coupled with any ILS for both the catalog and patron information.
- It is designed to allow sharing of reviews and other public content between libraries, thereby creating a larger social “pool”.
- The design is clean and looks to be well laid out.
The only problematic aspect I see initially is that it fails XHTML validation in a fairly dramatic way: the doctype is listed as XHTML 1.0 Strict, but appears to have over 50 problems with the home page alone (over 200 for an OPAC search result page). By just looking at the numbers, each type of page comes dramatically closer to validating as HTML 4.01 Strict (19 errors and 67 errors respectively) which seems odd to me.
Compromises in validation often have to be accepted for results pages, but I see no reason for not having a standards-compliant entry page. I suspect that this could be a great “clean up” project once the dust has settled from the upgrade.
Overall, this is a great accomplishment, and a great piece of software. This is certain to grab a lot of well-deserved attention, and will hopefully inspire all ILS and OPAC creators to improve their products.
thanks to Jessamyn for her post
