» Home

Welcome to the wonderful world of social cataloging!

Thesocialopac.net is the official website of the Social OPAC application suite--an award-winning, 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. Additional support comes from SOPAC's core development group.

Locum 1.1 RC1 Released

Submitted by jblyberg on Mon, 12/28/2009 - 1:27pm

The SOPAC development team is proud to announce the first release candidate for Locum 1.1. Locum is the software library that allows SOPAC to interface with the underlying ILS. It also maintains an external index of all of your library's holdings so that it can provide a set of optimized search tools.

1.1 is a significant improvement over 1.0 and paves the way for an imminent SOPAC 2.1 release candidate.

Significant developments include:

  • Multi-branch support
  • Checkout history
  • Diacritics support
  • Speed optimizations
  • Support for plug-ins

There are a number of significant architectural changes in Locum 2.1, so we are releasing it before SOPAC 2.1 in order that users can become familiar with it. It is not backward-compatible with SOPAC 2.0, however, so do not replace your current 1.0 implementations.

Many thanks go out to the SOPAC development team for their contributions to this milestone release.

Download:

SOPAC 2.0 Stable Released

Submitted by jblyberg on Thu, 09/24/2009 - 11:48pm

In an effort to clear the deck for a forthcoming SOPAC 2.1 release candidate, SOPAC 2.0-beta2 has been released with several very minor changes as 2.0 stable. If you have been running 2.0-beta2, you can safely upgrade to 2.0.

The SOPAC module is available for download from the SOPAC project page on drupal.org.

It's safe to say, at this point, that we'll be able to have a 2.1 release candidate ready no later than early November. Significant changes will also be included in Locum which will skip a stable 1.0 release in favor of its own 1.1 beta. Additionally, Insurge will move from alpha to beta.

Stay tuned!

AADL.org on SOPAC2

Submitted by jblyberg on Fri, 09/18/2009 - 1:14pm

Last month, Ann Arbor District Library went live with SOPAC2. After the herculean effort of upgrading from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 6, they soft-launched with v2.

AADL developers Eric Klooster and Ryan Eby are both active members of the SOPAC development group and have contributed a great deal of their work back to the project. A number of their enhancements will make their way into the forthcoming 2.1 release.

Congratulations to Ann Arbor for a job well done!

SOPAC 2.1: The Road Ahead

Submitted by jblyberg on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 6:24pm

As the summer rolls on, I thought I would post a quick update on the status of SOPAC 2.1. We have a lot of irons in the fire right now, but to give you an idea of what's coming, here is a rundown of what you can expect to see when 2.1 is release, sometime in the next two months:

Enhancements

- Multi-branch support
- Incorporation of 3rd-party data into discovery index (Syndetics, Amazon, etc)
- Destination login links within the catalog
- "X of Y copies" availability in the hitlist and record view
- Limit searches to available items
- Links for downloadable items
- Vacation holds (pause your holds)
- Internationalization
- Native support for diacritics

Modules

- Support for shared/no email address
- RSS everything
- Wish lists
- Twitter broadcasting
- Saved searches as a separate module
- Summer Reading module
- Checkout History
- Recommendation engine
- Search statistics
- SMS notifications / support
- "Recommend to a friend"
- Auto-renew items

What are your thoughts? What would you like to see featured in SOPAC?

PVLD Goes Live with SOPAC

Submitted by jblyberg on Wed, 07/15/2009 - 12:30pm

I knew it was coming, but it wasn't until I got back from ALA that I was able to head over to pvld.org and see for myself that SOPAC2 was live on the Palos Verdes Library District web site.

Palos Verdes, working with Crafty Space, has moved to SOPAC2 and in the process contributed back to the project some much-needed multi-branch support which will be included in the forthcoming 2.1 release, later this summer.

This launch comes right on the heels of receiving the 2009 LITA Brett Butler Award for the SOPAC project. So I'm feeling really good about SOPAC right now and especially about the community that is beginning to spring up around it--its users, the libraries, and a solid group of about nine people who are part of its active development group.

Be sure to visit the PVLD site and tag a few books for them.

Syndicate content