Take one OPAC. Add one blog. What do you get?

Casey Bisson at Plymouth State University has been doing some interesting work looking at alternative ways to offer OPAC-like functionality. He recently adapted the WordPress blogging tool to demonstrate how it might replace some aspects of the traditional public access catalogue. Read on to find out more about this intriguing experiment, and share your own thoughts about where all this could lead.

Casey discusses his 'WPopac' in this post to his blog, and I commented at the time in Panlibus.

Do we want to reproduce and enrich our OPACs in new ways, as Casey has begun to illustrate here, or do we want to instead concentrate upon unpacking the tightly intertwined set of services that comprise today's OPAC, and make them available for recombination in different ways, and in very different places such as the Course Management System, portal, or mobile phone screen?

What do you think, and what else is currently being done to reconstruct or repurpose the OPAC we know and endure?

Related examples include Dave Pattern's work on top of Horizon at Huddersfield, Ann Arbor District Library's online presence, the new catalogue at North Carolina State University (discussed here), and the insightful report [PDF] recently released by the University of California (discussed here).