K-State Libraries: Digital Initiatives

Overwhelmed by OPACs

Thanks once again to Dan Chudnov for blogging the most timely newsy-news at exactly the right moment. As we in DID contemplate an upgrade to Voyager 6.x, Dan points out that Casey Bisson has released the source code to Scriblio.

I am not up on the political shenanigans behind the debatable open-source street cred of Scriblio; I'm just interested in what this product could do for us. Simply put, Scriblio is a Word Press-based CMS and OPAC that presents libraries' bibliographic and other data in a format suited to the Web.

The irony is not lost on me that as Dan posted this announcement, we discussed the dis/advantages of upgrading to Voyager 6.x. Scriblio is not a replacement ILS by any means; it's a different way of presenting that ILS information to our users. It's a debate that our profession as a whole is facing - incremental modifications or sweeping, sudden changes. Stay tuned.

Evaluation points for blogging/CMS software

As requested, here is a preliminary list of criteria we can use to assess the suitability of a particular software for our site. Please feel free to comment away so that we can shape this into a usable list.

• multi-level admin: more than just a central admin person and users, ability to create sub-admin who have rights for certain content but not all
• access-control: what is available for restricting the viewing
• ability for sub-admins to control sidebar content and/or create categories
• clear direction about where a post will appear
• strong editing tools