It’s a good day for the OPAC today, as Casey Bisson takes home a Mellon Award for his work on the WPopac; that’s the WordPress front-end on an Innovative Interfaces catalog, described by Casey in his post WPopac: An OPAC 2.0 Testbed.

In other OPAC news, Library Thing impresario Tim Spalding has a nice post on Thing-ology entitled Is your OPAC fun? (a manifesto of sorts). (Don’t worry, manifesto-haters; it’s more of a party invitation than a call to the barricades).

And Tim really means fun! Not “fun” like “gee, it sure is fun to try and remember if this catalog defaults to an implied AND search or phrase searching on the keyword screen,” nor fun like “hey, look, an animated gif!” But real fun, like finding more cool stuff in the library because people recommend it, or reading reviews of stuff you didn’t know you were interested in, or taking an API and hacking some weird interface for the catalog; fun like that.

And both of those things just got me thinking about how fun it could be to design a whole library web site like that. Not just an OPAC, but a site that started from the premise that research, learning, finding interesting stuff to read and sharing what you found with others, is fun. A site where I don’t have to apologize to people for how weird it all is, and how many little places you have to look to find what you want.

It also got me thinking about what kind of user community you would need to support a library website that was more–as one commenter said on Thing-ology–more MySpace than Google. How many people would have to participate to make it a success? How could we put the “del.icio.us lesson”–that personal value precedes network value (i.e., people do stuff because it is useful to them first, and not out of some abstract idea of creating a network effect)–into practice on a library site?

Ideally, I’d have some sort of punch line here, where I had some more ideas on how to move forward. I don’t! So I’ll just say “go Casey! Go Tim!”