Yes, it’s opac Saturday! Every post must begin with the word “opac”! I’ve written before about the opac spellchecker we implemented using php and aspell here and here. A recent discussion on the iug mailing list about the official spellcheck product got me thinking about it again (start with this message to see the thread in question). Several problems with the official product were highlighted including:
- libraries cannot add words to the default dictionary
- spellcheck is only active for keyword searches, not author or title searches
- dictionary seems to be US-centric; for example, it considers “colour” to be mis-spelled
Interestingly, our homegrown spellchecker does not suffer from any of these problems! 
Not only can we add words to our dictionary, we can actually force particular suggestions for particular mis-spellings! Our spellchecker works for all types of searches including authors and titles. And our dictionary which is just identified as “English” includes both US and British/Canadian spellings.
That is not to say that our spellchecker is problem free. It does suffer from some problems which are either the result of our platform choice (php on windows) or my lazy programming. But on the whole, I think we came out ahead by building our own rather than purchasing the official offering. And this whole thread was useful for me in that it reminded me I wanted to come up with a list of popular authors’ names to add to our dictionary.
