What enhancements are available for integration into OPACs?

What vendors offer enhancements that can be incorporated into existing OPACs (online public access catalogs) or discovery layers? I'm specifically interested in enhancements that can appear in traditional catalogs without having to buy an additional discovery layer.

Gem

• opac

Comments

• KatieR: This is a really, really open and a better answer would come up if you were more specific with what discovery layers/enhancements are wanted.
• Verbeia: The answer below would make a great tag wiki for the opac tag. But as a Q&A, it is way too broad.
• Gem: What is a tag wiki? I was originally thinking this should be a community wiki but it looks like that has been deprecated in recent stack exchanges? The reason I asked the question is because our library is interested in knowing about _ALL_ possible enhancements, even ones we hadn't previously considered a need for.
• Joe: @Gem : it's just a description for a given tag, so you don't end up w/ people using it for polysemous terms. Of course, we need someone w/ 1500 rep to approve the edits, so even Dorothea is going to need another day or two.

Answer by Gem

Here are the ones that I know about:

Syndetics

http://www.bowker.com/en-US/products/syndetics/

Depending on the package, enhancements may include cover images, table of contents, book reviews, summaries, author notes, first chapters & excerpts, fiction profiles, biography profiles, find similar titles, series information, video & music, international content.

Content Cafe

http://www.ebscohost.com/public/content-cafe

Cover images, book reviews, summaries, table of contents, additional book details.

LibraryThing

http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries

Shelf browse, similar books, other editions and translations, tags, reviews, series, awards, lexile measurements and stack map. They also have announced free cover images.

ChiliFresh

http://www.chilifresh.com/

Book reviews, "connections", book covers.

Novelist Select

http://www.ebscohost.com/novelist/our-products/novelist-select

Series, similar books and authors, Goodreads reviews, Lexile, links to additional Novelist content.

Jaunter

http://jaunter.com/

Incorporates a "did you mean" option into the OPAC. Last I checked, it worked with SirsiDynix's Horizon HIP and Symphony.

Comments

Answer by eclecticlibrarian

Another option would be to go with an open source catalog discovery layer that has some of the tagging, faceting, and other interface enhancements you are interested in. My library is about to implement VuFind, and we plan to use it to replace the OPAC offered by our ILS vendor.

Comments