It’s not news anymore. It’s been blogged to death. But I just wanted to point out that OCLC’s free, public search interface is now available to all. This interface is still a baby interface with lots of upgrades planned in the next months, but once you’ve done a search you can see most of the things we’ve been calling for in catalogs, including faceted search (in the form of “Refine Your Search” on the right sidebar), FRBRized records (click on “editions” when you’ve clicked into a book’s record), user reviews, and more. You can also get a browser search box if you want, or embed a search box into a web site (hmmmm, so many ideas bouncing around in my head).
I’m intrigued by the note in the “help” screen that says that when you search from within a library-authenticated internet connection you may get a link to that library’s “As a Librarian” service. How do we get this added for my library? I don’t know. But it’s something we should think about doing.
Do you know of any libraries that are linking to it already? Is yours? We are talking about it, but things move slowly here in the frozen north.
No, we haven’t put the search box into our library site. We haven’t talked about it, though, so I don’t know if we will later.
I haven’t heard from anybody who is putting the box into their library pages yet, but there are quite a few people beginning to think about it.