OPAC Must Change

I think it’s high-time we discuss the role libraries and librarians play in disseminating information. Libraries have served as a point of information dissemination for at least 1400 years, long before Information Science came into being. One of the earliest classification schemes on record was created in China around 600 B.C. (Jiang, 2007).

It is not possible to really separate information organization, storage, and retrieval from dissemination. In order to make information available for dissemination, librarians must first organize it and store it in a way that makes retrieval possible. Information retrieval has undergone tremendous change in the last half-century. Once the province of the classification scheme and a card catalog, retrieval now is largely electronic. The card catalog morphed into the OPAC, but librarians and patrons have never been fully satisfied with the traditional OPAC’s functionality. It cannot easily be used for subject browsing, and is more difficult for patrons to use, who have become used to the ease of Internet searches with Google. To better fulfill their dissemination role, I think librarians must educate patrons and administrators on the value of classification systems, and OPACs must be improved to compete with Google.

One way to improve subject browsing would be to integrate an online classification system into the OPAC. In 1984 OCLC undertook an ambitious research project called the The DDC Online Project (Markey, 2006). Their team built an experimental online catalog that integrated the DDC schedules and relative index into its search capability. Evaluation during and after the experiment confirmed the success of the venture – subject browsing was enhanced, and participants gave rave reviews to its performance. In spite of these positive results, online classification as an end-user’s tool was not embraced by the nationwide library community. As Karen Markey, one of the primary researchers in online classification states, “Despite thirty-five years of research, the way in which today’s end users search classification online in OPACs is through simple shelflist browsing…..which has not changed since its initial implementation in the first OPACs in 1979” (Markey, 2006).

There have been other suggestions for improving the library online catalog, thereby improving dissemination. One involves using web-based technology by Endeca. In 2006, North Carolina State University deployed the first “next generation” online catalog in a library. The new software, Endeca’s Information Access Platform, replaced the old keyword search engine based on Boolean searches with state of the art retrieval technologies (Antelman, Lynema, and Pace, 2006). Up to this point, faceted navigation and browsing search software had only been used in commercial websites like Barnes and Noble. This development, along with a proposed partnership between Google and the Library of Congress for a “World Digital Library”, has stimulated discussion on the necessity for new OPACs using Endeca-style technology.

I can’t predict the future, but one thing is for sure: the Internet, Google, and mass digitization are forcing libraries to change the way they disseminate information. If libraries and librarians are to remain relevant in the 21st century, they must adopt improvements fairly quickly, or they will be swept aside in the tide of technological change.


Antelman K., Lynema E., & Pace A.K. (2006). Toward a twenty-
first century library catalog. Information Technology and
Libraries, 25(3), 128-139.

Jiang, S. (2007). Into the source and history of Chinese culture:
Knowledge classification in ancient China. Libraries and the
Cultural Record, 42(1), 1-20. Retrieved from
Project Muse database.

Markey, K. (2006). Forty years of classification online:
Final chapter or future unlimited? Cataloging and Classification
Quarterly, 42(3/4), 1-63. Retrieved from Haworth Press
database.