BiblioCommons

Last updated
BiblioCommons
Industry Software
Headquarters
Toronto
,
Canada
Parent Constellation Software (2020-present)
Website www.bibliocommons.com OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

BiblioCommons is a privately held company, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, that develops front end interactive catalog and web services for libraries. In February 2020, BiblioCommons was acquired by Volaris Group, an operating segment of Constellation Software. [1] [2]

Contents

Over 200 public libraries in four countries, worldwide, currently use a BiblioCommons OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog). BiblioCore, the online catalog, integrates with existing Integrated Library Systems (ILSs) and creates a complete OPAC replacement that features searching, account integration, new tools for discovery, eBook integration, library staff recommendations, and the ability to create a community around the library collection.

Other services include a mobile suite with BiblioMobile; the ability to manage web sites that have dynamic web options with BiblioWeb (a content management system); to integrate summer reading microsites with Biblio Summer Sites; to make public library resources available through school library catalogs with BiblioSchools; to integrate ebook lending and buying within the catalog with BiblioDigital; and to integrate event listings straight into the catalog with BiblioEvents. There are more options, modules, and improvements being worked on all the time.[ citation needed ]

In 2008, Library Journal called BiblioCommons "a revolutionary social discovery system for libraries". [3]

BiblioCommons has an arrangement with Knowledge Ontario that makes it Knowledge Ontario's "Connect Ontario" project. [4]

Origins

BiblioCommons began not as a software company, but as a nonprofit youth literacy initiative. Co-founder Beth Jefferson was interested in the ways teens were using emerging technologies to engage with popular culture and wondered how youth literacy could be improved if a social context around reading could be established online. [5] The perF!nk Project (Perceive. Feel. Think) that emerged won a national award from the Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) and began attracting broader attention – particularly, from libraries. [6]

From perF!nk to BiblioCommons

Asking questions, the team began to explore the potential leverage of the public library’s online catalog for the end user. Could they create conversation and engagement where people already were, in the library’s web catalog?

The perf!nk project caught the attention of the Ontario Library Association, which committed research funding. Over the next 18 months, BiblioCommons conducted surveys and more than 100 one-on-one interviews in four library systems to explore the possibilities for re-envisioning the library catalog. Three Canadian provincial agencies were sufficiently impressed with the research and resulting vision to fund prototypes, and ultimately to purchase advance subscriptions. Their early commitments enabled BiblioCommons to build the envisioned services and roll them out to interested libraries in those jurisdictions.

From beta to production

Following 18 months of user research and a year-long beta test, with six libraries, as well as ongoing research and feedback, BiblioCommons created prototypes of the BiblioCore catalog and improved scalability, usability, and configurability before rolling out to broader audiences.

BiblioCommons re-launched its re-designed services to several large systems in late 2009.

Searching and rating

The basic BiblioCore search box is built with automatic relevance ranking algorithms, data mapping, faceted searches, natural language detection, and a "did-you-mean?" functionality to make searching the online public library catalog easier and more intuitive. Advanced searches allow a user to narrow down their query by format, location, availability, topic, publication date, tag, and more.

Users that are logged into the library system can add tags to books, ratings, age recommendations, book reviews, and more. Anything added to the BiblioCore catalog can be seen by other users on the BiblioCommons system, making the library catalog a larger, more diverse and more robust online community.

Users can also create shelves with which to group books; create "completed", "in progress", and "for later" shelves to manage and sequence their reading progress; and follow other library users for book recommendations and reviews.

Other products

BiblioCommons also offers other modules and products that work with BiblioCore for public libraries.

Libraries using BiblioCommons

As of April 2014, BiblioCommons has been adopted by over 200 libraries in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, and has over 10 million registered BiblioCommons users.[ citation needed ]

BiblioCommons beta tested at Oakville Public Library, Ontario. Testing started in July 2008.[ citation needed ]

The second library network to launch BiblioCommons was the Perth County Information Network in Ontario, which includes Perth East Public Library, Stratford Public Library, and West Perth Public Library.[ citation needed ] The library network went live with BiblioCommons in August 2009 and officially launched in October 2009. [7]

Libraries using the BiblioCommons catalog include: the Boston Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Christchurch City Libraries, Edmonton Public Library, Multnomah County Public Library, Ottawa Public Library, Princeton Public Library, Seattle Public Library, Vancouver Public Library, Yarra Plenty Regional Library, and many others. [8]

The Chicago Public Library system went live with the BiblioCore catalog in 2013 and launched their website based on BiblioCMS in April 2014. [9] The Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library introduced its version of the BiblioCore catalog, revamped BiblioWeb site, and BiblioApps mobile interface in August 2020.

The Brooklyn Public Library, New York Public Library, and CLEVNET previously used BiblioCommons, but have since returned to using discovery systems provided by their ILS vendors. [10]

ILS integration

BiblioCore works by integrating with a library's current Integrated Library System (ILS). [11]

The ILSs that BiblioCommons currently[ when? ] works with are: Carl-X, Evergreen, Horizon, Millennium, Polaris, Sierra, Symphony, SirsiDynix, and VTLS.[ citation needed ]

Privacy

BiblioCommons collects some personally identifiable information, such as library card number, from users who access their library account from the service. BiblioCommons secures and encrypts all personal information provided by the user during the registration process. BiblioCommons does not share information or activity with ad networks or other entities that are not directly involved in the library's services, [12] and does not store any information regarding a user's borrowing data, book history, or recently returned items.[ citation needed ] Nonetheless, the fact that BiblioCommons collects personally identifiable information at all has raised concerns, [13] which persist into 2019. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Library catalog</span> Register of bibliographic items

A library catalog is a register of all bibliographic items found in a library or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations. A catalog for a group of libraries is also called a union catalog. A bibliographic item can be any information entity that is considered library material, or a group of library materials, or linked from the catalog as far as it is relevant to the catalog and to the users (patrons) of the library.

A discovery system is a bibliographic search system based on search engine technology. It is part of the concept of Library 2.0 and is intended to supplement or even replace the existing OPAC catalogs. These systems emerged in the late 2000s in response to user desire for a more convenient search option similar to that of internet search engine. The results from searching a discovery system may include books and other print materials from the library's catalog, electronic resources such as e-journals or videos, and items stored in other libraries.

The online public access catalog (OPAC), now frequently synonymous with library catalog, is an online database of materials held by a library or group of libraries. Online catalogs have largely replaced the analog card catalogs previously used in libraries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OCLC</span> Global library cooperative (1967–)

OCLC, Inc., doing business as OCLC, is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center, then became the Online Computer Library Center as it expanded. In 2017, the name was formally changed to OCLC, Inc. OCLC and thousands of its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded mainly by the fees that libraries pay for the many different services it offers. OCLC also maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system.

An integrated library system (ILS), also known as a library management system (LMS), is an enterprise resource planning system for a library, used to track items owned, orders made, bills paid, and patrons who have borrowed.

Library 2.0 is a proposed concept for library services that facilitate user contributions and other features of Web 2.0, which includes online services such as OPAC systems. The term "Library 2.0" was coined by Michael Casey in 2006 on his blog Library Crunch.

LibraryThing is a social cataloging web application for storing and sharing book catalogs and various types of book metadata. It is used by authors, individuals, libraries, and publishers.

A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents and books. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VTLS</span>

VTLS Inc. was a global company that provided library automation software and services to a diverse customer base of more than 1900 libraries in 44 countries. The for-profit company was founded in 1985 by Dr. Vinod Chachra, who became the President and CEO of the company. VTLS originated as "Virginia Tech Library Systems", an automated circulation and cataloging system created for Virginia Tech’s Newman Library in 1975. In addition to its headquarters in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States, VTLS had five international offices in Australia, Brazil, India, Malaysia and Spain. VTLS was one of the few ISO 9001:2008 quality-certified companies within the library industry for many years. The company was acquired by Innovative Interfaces in 2014.

Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. It is an enhanced version of web search that combines traditional algorithms. The idea behind social search is that instead of ranking search results purely based on semantic relevance between a query and the results, a social search system also takes into account social relationships between the results and the searcher. The social relationships could be in various forms. For example, in LinkedIn people search engine, the social relationships include social connections between searcher and each result, whether or not they are in the same industries, work for the same companies, belong the same social groups, and go the same schools, etc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zotero</span> Open-source reference management software

Zotero is free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials, such as PDF and ePUB files. Features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies, integrated PDF, ePUB and HTML readers with annotation capabilities, and a note editor, as well as integration with the word processors Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, and Google Docs. It was originally created at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and, as of 2021, is developed by the non-profit Corporation for Digital Scholarship.

Evergreen is an open-source integrated library system (ILS), initially developed by the Georgia Public Library Service for Public Information Network for Electronic Services (PINES), a statewide resource-sharing consortium with over 270 member libraries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PMB (software)</span>

PMB is a fully featured open source integrated library system. It is continuously developed and maintained by the French company PMB Services.

SirsiDynix is a United States company which produces integrated library system (ILS) software and associated services for libraries.

The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NewGenLib</span>

NewGenLib is an integrated library management system developed by Verus Solutions Pvt Ltd. Domain expertise is provided by Kesavan Institute of Information and Knowledge Management in Hyderabad, India. NewGenLib version 1.0 was released in March 2005. On 9 January 2008, NewGenLib was declared free and open-source under GNU GPL. The latest version of NewGenLib is 3.1.1 released on 16 April 2015. Many libraries across the globe are using NewGenLib as their Primary integrated library management system as seen from the NewGenlib discussion forum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenBiblio</span>

OpenBiblio is an open source Integrated Library System. The software is popular with small and rural libraries worldwide due to its simplicity, extensive language support, and good documentation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Library Corporation</span>

The Library Corporation (TLC) creates and distributes automation and cataloging software to public, school, academic, and special library systems worldwide. Based in Inwood, W.Va., with additional offices in Denver, Singapore, and Ontario, the company is owned and operated by the same family that established it in 1974.

A library portal is an interface to access library resources and services through a single access and management point for users: for example, by combining the circulation and catalog functions of an integrated library system (ILS) with additional tools and facilities.

An online video platform (OVP) enables users to upload, convert, store, and play back video content on the Internet, often via a private server structured, large-scale system that may generate revenue. Users will generally upload video content via the hosting service's website, mobile or desktop application, or other interfaces (API), and typically provides embed codes or links that allow others to view the video content.

References

  1. ↑ Breeding, Marshall (February 14, 2020). "BiblioCommons Acquired by Constellation Software". American Libraries.
  2. ↑ Zubairi, Amira (February 13, 2020). "Today in acquisitions: BiblioCommons, Shoplogix". BetaKit.
  3. ↑ Oder (July 19, 2008). "BiblioCommons Emerges: 'Revolutionary'; Social Discovery System for Libraries". Library Journal. Archived from the original on July 1, 2016. Retrieved November 9, 2014.
  4. ↑ "<Index". Knowledge Ontario. Archived from the original on 2009-04-17.
  5. ↑ "Pop Culture is Hook for Teen Readers" (PDF). The Toronto Star. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-10-29. Retrieved 2013-09-17.
  6. ↑ "Origins". BiblioCommons. Retrieved 2020-05-11.
  7. ↑ "Title???". The Beacon Herald.[ permanent dead link ]
  8. ↑ "Participating BiblioCommons Libraries". BiblioCommons. Archived from the original on 2014-11-09. Retrieved 2014-11-09.
  9. ↑ Breeding, Marshall, ed. (April 2015). "BiblioCommons Forges Path to Innovation". Smart Libraries Newsletter. ALA TechSource. 35 (4): 6.
  10. ↑ "Smart Libraries Q&A: Trends in resource management and discovery systems". Smart Libraries Newsletter. October 2017.
  11. ↑ "How We Work: Our Platform". Bibliocommons. Archived from the original on 2013-05-31. Retrieved 2013-09-17.
  12. ↑ "BiblioCommons US Privacy Statement" . Retrieved 7 February 2015.
  13. ↑ Greiner, Tony (Guest Columnist) (July 12, 2013). "Hold that book, but you're risking your privacy: Guest opinion". The Oregonian.
  14. ↑ Warfield, Peter (Guest Columnist) (Jan 15, 2015). "Privacy concerns abound over BiblioCommons: Guest opinion". The Bay Area Reporter. Archived from the original on April 10, 2016.
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