Days 2 and 3 of the conference were devoted to user programs and programs for users by Polaris staff. There was a PUG business meeting after breakfast and there were some changes to the bylaws we were asked to consider for a vote at the next business meeting on Saturday. It was really informative. I plan to read the bylaws a lot more carefully. Business meetings are limited, of course, to members and it was well attended.
The Polaris staff programs were not sales pitches but programs on how to do things or how things work. This is a nice opportunity to learn from the experts - especially for a newcomer like me. I was honored to be asked to be part of a panel called Accidental IT - and this my first year at PUG conference.
PUG has three tracks at their conferences: Administrators, Workflow, and Technology. There are three time slots per day so there were 9 programs on Day 2. I had the same problem at the PUG conference that I had at my former group conference in that I really would have liked to attend all of them but had to pick one. Breakfast and Lunch were part of the conference cost and there were plenty of breaks - which means more food.
The Keynote speaker this year was Marshall Breeding. His topic was next-generation technologies for public libraries. I just loved his comment during the beginning of his presentation: “Things are really different - and I mean it!” He talked about the ILS industry being in turmoil with a very veiled comment that “takeovers have damaged the industry.” And we all know who that means!
I won’t go into a great deal of detail on his talk because it would take more time to do that than just an overview. The gist of the talk was that ILS opacs are woefully behind the industry leaders like Amazon.com and search engines. As I have been known to say, more than once and to everyone who will listen, for the first time in the history of libraries we have competition!
Mr. Breeding pointed out ILS opacs have lagged way behind and “the next generation library interfaces are delivering tomorrow, what we needed yesterday.” Even today’s college students start a search with a search engine like Google NOT with the library opac. ILS opacs need to learn from ecommerce how to build a better interface.
The only commercial opac that approaches a modern look and feel while incorporating the multi-level searching is AquaBrowser. and I’m proud to say when Mr. Breeding researched how many Polaris customers are using AquaBrowser he found only 2 and Ouachita Parish Public Library is one of them!!!!!
He had many excellent suggestions for ILS opacs and I sincerely hope the folks at Polaris are listening and taking notes. I think they are because as I said in the first post on the conference I had a long talk with the opac developer about this very thing. Perhaps ILS companies should not try to compete but partner with someone who already has the product and just brand it with some customs for their customers.
OPAC is ALL that MediaLabs does. They know how to do it and do it well. Why use your precious resources trying to copy them or Amazon, or Yahoo. Partner and make the opac what the public is used to and wants. OK, that is my soapbox not Mr. Breeding’s.
It was a good, really productive day and was topped of with one heck of a President’s reception. Good food, good music, made lots of friends, dancing, singing, Chris, Tony, Frances, Lisa, Janet, Tina, Bob - The Legend, Mary, Janus, Brad (dancing with the ILS vendors) and his wife, Denis. And the big man - Bill doing YMCA!