Mack asked me, in the comments to my OPAC Sucks button, why my OPAC sucked. I thought it would be nice if I stopped yapping at the mouth and came up with some solid reasons that I disliked my OPAC. If I am going to spew forth the word “sucks” and “OPAC” in front of my Dean, I should be able to say why I hold this opinion.
I think my OPAC sucks because:
- results can only be listed in reverse chronological order
- results show only the title of the item with a link
- it will not correct my bad spelling
- you have to know that there are not certain formats in there (like articles)(this is an obvious endorsement for federated searching)
- it is ugly and people do not like to look at ugly things
- lots of MARC information is displayed that no one cares about, sometimes even the cataloger that had to put it there
- it should support tagging and tag searching AND keywords AND subject headings because people like choices (as long as they are labeled in a way that makes sense, see #14)
- if I do not type “U.S. News and World Reports” in exactly that fashion with the periods and spaces, my OPAC thinks we do not have this item
- no relevance ranking
- no full text searching
- does not correct my spelling
- will not allow me to print a list of marked records with meaningful information without printing out each record individually and most people, including me, do not take the time to do this
- user comments would be awesome
- In the search display, the user has to choose between keywords and subjects. Most people do not know what the difference is and end up keyword searching in a function only meant to search LCSH.
- it does not correct my spelling
- with all my practice and training, sometimes I can not find things I know we have, how can I expect my users to find anything?
Please feel free to add some of your own.
–Jane, needs to get back to work