Welcome to the wonderful world of social cataloging!

Thesocialopac.net is the official website of the Social OPAC application suite--an open source social discovery platform for bibliographic data. The purpose of this site is to build a cohesive community of users and developers around the SOPAC project suite.

If you are looking to get started using SOPAC, the Getting Started guide and documentation page is the right place to start.

If you have questions about SOPAC, you may want to browse and participate in the forums.

SOPAC, Locum, and Insurge are written and maintained by John Blyberg and supported by the Darien Library in Darien, Connecticut.

Support for Koha and SOPAC

BibLibre's Nicolas Morin gave a presentation last week called "SOPAC: Connecting Drupal and Koha" where he talks about BibLibre's experience with SOPAC and getting a Locum conector to work with Koha. Check it out:

SOPAC on Drupal.org

In an effort to build a framework for structured collaboration and development on SOPAC, we've created a project page on drupal.org for SOPAC. Official and development releases will be available from the project page, and linked to from this site.

Additionally, in order to conform to Drupal versioning, the SOPAC versioning convention has changed. Instead of 2.0.0-beta2, the current version number can be expressed as 6.x-2.0-beta2. This does not change the concept of SOPAC2 as a product and it should continue to be referred to as SOPAC2.

Locum and Insurge releases, however, will continue to be served from thesocialopac.net, as will any discussion regarding all three projects.

BibLibre to Begin Work on Koha Connector

Some good news on the thrid-party SOPAC development front from France. BibLibre plans to begin work on a Koha connector.

Paul Poulain sent the following to the Koha development group:

Hello,

I'm very pleased to announce that BibLibre has started working on a
SOPAC connector for Koha.

SOPAC is a module of drupal, written to have a perfectly integrated
web2.0 catalogue over the CMS drupal. You can find information here :
http://www.thesocialopac.net/

It's a new Biblibrian that works on that : jean-andré Santoni. He's
still a student, working on this subject for 2 months. Hopefully, once
he has finished his school, he will be hired by BibLibre.

He will implement many new webservices, that will follow the DLF
Discovery Interface scheme (http://diglib.org/architectures/ilsdi/)

He started last week, and the 1st days are very encouraging. We will let
you know once it can be opened.

As usual, it will be GPL-ed, even if we still haven't decided how to
distribute the code (use koha, sopac or BibLibre tools & repositories ?)

happy day.
--
Paul POULAIN
http://www.biblibre.com
Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc
Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08

SOPAC Wins the Brett Butler Award

We're very happy to announce that SOPAC application suite is now an award-winning project. It has won the 2009 LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award. (read more)

This award comes at a very good time as we begin a spring development push toward a version 2.1 release (scheduled for mid-May). A lot of new and exciting features are on the way!

ACPL, Sirsi, and SOPAC

More good news for SOPAC this month.

Sean Robinson has just posted a walk-through on how to get SOPAC working with Sirsi! Sean and his staff at Allen County Public Library have been steadily working on a Locum connector for Sirsi for several months now. When I last had a chance to hang out with Sean at Internet Librarian he had told me that they were very close to having a working connector for Sirsi.

What is truly impressive is that they were able to do it without the connector documentation that I have been so slow to produce. It's coming!

Kudos to the ACPL staff and their hard work!

To grab the connector, pull it down with svn:

svn export svn://drupal.acpl.lib.in.us/sirsisopac

YourLibrarySite to Offer SOPAC Integration

Some very good news from Eugene, Oregon! Drupal web design firm Craftyspace is going to integrate SOPAC into their YourLibrarySite product suite. This means that they will be offering their expertise to implement and support SOPAC in your organization.

Back in September, Joseph Munich and Alex Bronstein paid a visit to Darien Library for a development summit. We spent a good amount of time talking about SOPAC and Drupal and where it will go in the future. What impresses me about Craftyspace is that they are not a company that has just cropped up in response to Drupal's popularity--they have been key members of and contributors to the Drupal development community for several years and see libraries as a naturally receptive market for the CMS.

They are currently working on implementing SOPAC at Palos Verdes Library District. I'm looking forward to the final product!

From their press release:

The library website development team at YourLibrarySite.com (a website development initiative offered by CraftySpace, LLC) is currently integrating Social OPAC functionality with the Palos Verdes Library District’s website (PVLD.org). YourLibrarySite is using John Blyberg’s SOPAC2 Drupal module to integrate PVLD’s ILS with their website. This integration empowers library patrons to review, tag and rate biblio records without leaving PVLD’s website, and to view the content created by other patrons.



Site Launch & Initial Software Release

It's taken me a little longer than expected to get this project site launched. I've been determined to get it up and running before the end of September and with the growing number of people asking to get their hands on SOPAC, it comes not a moment too soon.

So, welcome to thesocialopac.net. We have big plans for SOPAC and this site will only grow as we build a community around the project.

One quick note on the current release status

Because we launched SOPAC without the benefit of ever having done any production testing, we've identified a number of critical enhancements that need to be made. I will be working on those over the next few weeks, but I want to make sure that anyone who downloads beta1 knows that there will be a significant change in how card numbers are stored and handled in beta2. I will make available any upgrade scripts so that an upgrade path exists, but I just want you to be forewarned.

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