A library catalog for the 21st century, using WordPress & Aquabrowser

I’d like to share the recent efforts of me and my colleagues at the PBC (a regional library services agency) in creating a renewed, dynamic library catalog/blog for the public libraries in the province of Antwerp (Belgium).

The end result is a WordPress blog that integrates seamlessly with the library catalog. Catalog searches can be made from within the blog and blog-posts can redirect you to specific library items inside the catalog, which is a pretty cool feature. (have a look at the finished product at: http://provant.bibliotheek.be ; only available in Dutch)

Building a combined OPAC for a group of libraries

Our job at the PBC is to build and maintain a centralised library system for a group of municipal public libraries (currently about 40 of them), thus creating cost efficiencies and reducing the individual workload of each library. An added bonus for library users is that they can now not only search their local library catalog, but also find results from other nearby libraries.

Participating libraries give up their local servers and OPAC’s when they become a member of the provincial system. (Or put more positively: local councils don’t have to invest anymore in expensive servers and software) However, centralisation doesn’t necessarily mean that all the participating local libraries have to lose their online identity and dissapear into the networked OPAC. Local libraries get an individualised header-image AND, more importantly, we specifically wanted to create an environment that gives all of them the possibility to use their OPAC as a local communication tool.

The building blocks

That last sentence makes clear why we made the choice of combining the features of a catalog with those of a website or blog. We think it’s useful to combine both in one website/interface: Library users need only consult one website + we’re quite wild about the possibilities it gives us for digitally showcasing the library’s materials, the possibility of interacting with customers etc. Even nowadays, most libraries still make do with some static pages on the city’s website and an old-fashioned search system. With our system we also want to stimulate and empower libraries to do more.

WordPress’ user friendliness should make it easy to let library staff at the various libraries contribute articles to the blog, ensuring a lively, regularly updated blog/catalog. We would like to work towards a situation where we have a network of editors and contributors from the various libraries.

The set-up:
-WordPress as a “front page” for the library catalog
-Aquabrowser as the engine behind it

The specific extra’s we needed:
Different profiles of both blog and catalog for the various participating libraries/branches.

Luckily, Serials Solutions (the company behind aquabrowser) had already started to develop a profile function for their software, as we’re not the only ones who want to use their tool within a network of libraries. The aquabrowser profile-functions make it possible to let users search locally, search a specific set of branches or search within a wider region. It also provides some styling options such as individualised header-images for the various branches.

But to give our central catalog a more fancy look&feel and because we wanted it to become a digital showcase, we turned to WordPress. After trying out various themes we settled for the Arras theme which is sober but elegant. The posts and pages that are shown on the blog are maintained by both ourselves and the participating libraries. There are posts and pages that are visible in all OPAC’s (network-wide) and posts or pages that need only be visible in a specific branch. I will explain how we made this work:

Integrating WordPress with Aquabrowser

a) Changing the code behind the WordPress searchbox to redirect searches to the aquabrowser –> easily done in this manner (you need an account from the aquabrowser-folks to access the ‘Aquapedia’)

b) Adding hyperlinks that act as aquabrowser search-queries –> check the aquabrowser documentation (same restriction as above)
This is good for creating a couple of fixed links like the ones on the left hand side in our catalogwebsite, that refer to various subsets of the collection, but we wanted to be able to make links to library-items from within wordpress posts and pages. –> we had a WordPress developer make us a plugin that adds this function to the wysiwyg-editor in WordPress. With it, you can select any piece of text and turn it into an aquabrowser search query (e.g. author’s name, title, subject, …)  –> This is what i mean with ‘digitally showcasing the library materials’. For instance, you can write a post about a writer that’s visiting the library, then link to his/her books from within the post. Or talk about travel destinations, linking to travel guides and so on.

c) Creating a header that’s used in both WordPress and aquabrowser –> gives you the feel of staying within one website + contains the hyperlinks to return to the front page.

Making Local Profiles

As said we also wanted to make it possible for libraries to add local news stories, events, specific pages etc. to the blog. However we don’t want local news stories from A to be visible in B, certainly not when the blog/catalog is used from a library pc. This lead to the following developments (with the help of the same WP-developer):

a) Creation of a WordPress category “local news” with subcategories for each branch/library

b) Creating separate ‘profile’ websites for each library. –> We opted for an url-based solution that looks like this [general url/name of the town]
–> Have a try and look at http://bornem.bibliotheek.be and http://westerlo.bibliotheek.be
You’ll notice different header-images, a different list of links (right column) and different stories under the “Lokaal Nieuws” section.

c) Creating an array of all those profiles in a new theme-file (list.php); then adding code to the main index, archive and other pages to make sure it checks which profile a user is viewing (e.g. url/mechelen) then shows only the local news posts stored in the corresponding category.

d) Creating link categories for each library/branch that contain links to specific pages (e.g. opening hours) and websites (these are also put into the array)

e) The biggest technical challenge: all the posts that contain hyperlinks to aquabrowser search-queries should ‘intelligently’ adapt to search queries inside the right branch:

• A visitor of the general Isis-website clicks on a link > the returned search results are from all the libraries within our network
• A visitor of a profile website (e.g. isis.pbcantwerpen.be/mechelen) clicks on the very same link > only search results from Mechelen are shown

==> Javascript was added to make sure that search queries (in essence url’s) are formatted in the right fashion by adding the right ‘c_profile=name of town’ variable at the end of each url that is encountered on a webpage.

Technical Summary

What did we use:

WordPress 2.9.2
Arras Theme 1.3.6
Code tweaking and plugin development by myself (the easy stuff) and by Design is Dead (the tricky stuff)

What do you think?

We are eager to learn your thoughts concerning our efforts. Feel free to leave feedback or link to this article. By the way, does anyone have a better word than “blog slash catalog” for me?  —> (upd) Social OPAC was suggested in the comments, does seem like a good term.

Last but not least: we give free access to all our code and the plugin that was developed! Contact me if you want it to build a similar solution.

(UPD) If you like this you might also like:

Readers of this blogpost might probably also be interested in:

Scriblio (a fully WP-based OPAC)
WordPress for libraries discussion group