One Big Library.

It's time for a CSS Zen OPAC. Remember the CSS Zen Garden, and how that changed your opinion of what's really possible with CSS? If you look around today, you'll see many libraries experimenting with slicker new user interfaces for their data (if you haven't seen any for yourself, see Ryan Eby's post, which is Solr-specific, but there are also plenty of non-Solr projects doing the same thing, too). Right now, though, a lot of the experimentation is being done by us #code4lib types - usually systems folks comfortable with coding but not necessarily the best design eyes.

One thing we could do to push the boundaries further is a CSS Zen OPAC (Garden) - think about if the HTML sitting behind the CSS Zen Garden were an OPAC screen? Think about all the crazy ideas that might bubble up if we could throw a cleanly-designed, thoughtfully semantic-html OPAC screen up and let the world's best graphic designers and CSS gurus explore new directions and designs.

It's one thing just to have nice facet boxes, and clean record layouts, and helpful links and navbars and so forth. But we've all seen that now. What else could we do?

A side benefit of such a project could be converging on some semantic html patterns for OPAC markup - an OPAC macroformat, perhaps, or perhaps a handful of cooperating microformats.

Maybe we could change opinions of what's possible with OPACs. What do you think?

Just for fun, here are screenshots of what a 20-minutes-to-develop OPAC might look like. It just uses the Django project's built-in admin screens over a simple mysql db and offers simple access to about 250,000 records from the medical and historical medical libraries I work for.

This was literally a 20-minute project. You can search for records by title, author, or imprint information, and filter by local location codes. This screenshot is the first result page from a search of all locations for "darwin":

And this is the same search, restricted to the location code for "historical medical, locked stacks" (i.e. the really cool but complicated stuff):

The data is from an extract from voyager generated using a tool written by staff at the Yale Libraries' Integrated Library Technology Services group.

suki, the repository into which I'm putting the full bib records in multiple formats for all this data, will soon actually own a copy of all this data and I can hook a more-than-20-minute search interface up to it for real. Still, cool, eh?