Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) launched their version of a social catalogue in January 2007. “SOPAC”, short for “social OPAC”, was developed by the library as a way of integrating social software tools such as tags, ratings, reviews, and comments into the catalogue.

The developers of SOPAC have been successful in truly integrating all of these options throughout the library catalogue. In addition to the traditional search box on the catalogue home page the user is also presented with a list of the most commonly used tags, a link to a view of the catalog as a tag cloud, as well as the most recent and randomly selected tags and reviews. Once a user has arrived at an item record, they are presented with the average rating of the book, a link to user reviews, and the tags that have been used to label the item.

(Click image to enlarge – image source: http://www.aadl.org/sopac/viewrev/?bnum=1211031)

In the spirit of Web 2.0, the added features of SOPAC are entirely user-driven – the tags, ratings, reviews, and comments are all generated by SOPAC users. To participate, an account must be created, however one does not need to be a member of AADL to do this. This participation and service is open to all web users. The advantage of having an account is the ability to track the tags and other additions you, as an individual, have made to the catalogue. You can view your tags in a tag cloud, or in a list where they can be managed – viewed, modified, deleted, etc. The optional functions – tagging, rating, reviewing, and commenting – are all very integrated. A user has the option of participating in all four activities from the same screen, but is in no way obligated, for instance, to tag an item because he/she also reviewed it. Other options for user participation include commenting on other reviews or rating their usefulness. There are many more intricacies to these aspects of the catalogue than can be covered here. To see more details about these features, this 15 minute screencast by SOPAC developer John Blyberg is excellent.

When SOPAC had just been released, Blygerg posted in his blog Blyberg.net that he was “rather excited to see if library users will respond to these tools in an OPAC setting as much as Web 2.0 users have to commercial social networking sites”. Well, I’m sure by now he’s pleased with the outcome. Browsing through the catalogue, the added social features seem to be well used, for a service that’s not even a year old. Personally, I’m not sure I would create my own set of tags or write too many reviews. But, as with other services that utilize similar tools such as Amazon.com, I would definitely utilize ratings and reviews left by others, when selecting an item. This raises another point – many more users are most likely gaining benefit from the tags, ratings, and reviews than are actually creating them. The amount of use, then, is difficult to gauge, but I imagine it’s high in the case of SOPAC. The features are easy to use, easy to navigate between, and clearly give added value to the catalogue. The only improvement I would ideally like to see is faster loading times for the tags and reviews in the right-hand column, as there is a delay, similar to that in Scriblio.

There are many other interesting features incorporated into SOPAC, such as the inclusion of colour book jackets; links to profiles of the items including plot summary, character profiles, etc.; links to the item records in Google Books; recommended similar items based on past user patterns; and permalinks for each record which enable them to be searched with tools such as Google. Users also have the option of collecting electronic catalogue cards where they can write their comments about the item.

(Click image to enlarge – image source: http://www.blyberg.net/downloads/iConn-SOPAC-110807.pdf)

Another great aspect of SOPAC is that the source code is free to download from Blyberg.net, for any library that would like to enhance their catalogue in a similar way.