Library Catalogs Should Be Like WordPress Library catalogs should be be like WordPress. That is, every entry should support comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks. Every record should have a permalink. Content should be tag-able. The look should be easily customizable with themes. Everything should be available via RSS or Atom. It should be extendable with a rich plugin API. And when that fails, it would be nice if it were all written in a convenient language like PHP so we can hack it ourselves. Beside the part about “written in a convenient language like PHP”, this would make library catalogs much more useful and entertaining. However, it would also add complexity and spam issues. Amazon has recently started a similar approach to their listings including adding a customer wiki. Thanks to Eric Schnell who posted a detailed review of the original thought and some insight into WordPress OPAC or WOPAC. This […]