New, Smarter Catalog | Daniel Boone Regional Library

New, Smarter Catalog | Daniel Boone Regional Library: "New, Smarter Catalog


Searching for Books Becomes Faster, Easier and More Fun
This year the library plans to revolutionize the online catalog you use to look up books, music and more. We’re very excited about the transformation you’ll see this winter.

The Daniel Boone Regional Library will be only the second library system in the U.S. to use this innovative software, called BiblioCommons, that greatly improves searching and offers social networking tools to library users.

Behind the scenes, a smarter search algorithm gives you better results, and the sleek, modern interface provides easy ways to narrow or expand your search or browse for related items. For each book, CD, DVD or other item you’ll have interactive options like adding your own review, tags and rating or sharing the item on Facebook or Twitter. You can also make your own lists of books and follow other users with similar taste.

We’re working hard, along with the staff at BiblioCommons, to finish up all the technical details of customizing the software for DBRL, and we hope to premiere the new catalog in February."

Bibliocommons

I've been exploring the new DBRL catalog format. Bibliocommons is a great improvement in many ways. I love the pictures! The catalog pages are visually appealing and the immediate movement of the scrolling book covers add excitement. The little blurb that appears below many of the books is a good feature. Playing with the interface, exploring the many features is great fun. If I knew the exact title of a book in the system, it popped right up.

Using it to actually try to find books without an exact title is easier than the old system. What few problems I had, I suspect relate back to the underlying SIRSI catalog, and the old standby: "user error." That is to say, at times, I didn't know exactly what I was looking for....and floundered a bit trying to narrow down my choices. Unfortunately, patrons often are not able to give us an exact title.

The social networking aspects are useful and interesting. I made a list of local Callaway authors and rated a few books I liked. There were times, during the after school busy period, that it seemed a bit slow to handle these additional features. Probably because our internet connection is fully loaded during those periods.

It is absolutely essential that ALL staff who will be working with the public get comfortable with the new system before it is opened to the public. I'm sure we will have many questions, and we don't want to be fumbling for answers.