Early in August, Library Technology Guides linked to 3 sites using III’s new Encore product. This is essentially an opac frontend and catalogue enrichment product. I guess the product is still in beta and like most beta software, it is still pretty rough around the edges. It also has some promising features. I did look at all 3 implementations but my testing did mostly focus on the Nashville Public Library site since they are a public library so hopefully I don’t make any incorrect generalizations based on that one implementation. 
The Good
- Faceted search results are nice.
- I like the popular choices scroller and the way it does not refresh the page when scrolling. Not sure what data the choices are based on.
- The tag cloud is good although it is really subject keys, not tags. Not sure what will happen once actual tags are enabled. Will the tag cloud mix subject keys and tags?
- On the bib page, they are using reflection.js. Unless someone contradicts me, I’ll lay claim to being the first developer to use this in a library app.
- I notice the software is built on the Tapestry Application Framework, a Java app framework. I wonder if this permits some code customization opportunities? I’m guessing not.
- They seem to have abandoned their multiple choice spellchecker suggestions. While developing our homegrown spellchecker, we briefly debated this approach but decided it was confusing for users.
The Bad
- What’s with the url for the application? (http://nplencore.library.nashville.org/iii/encore/app) Couldn’t make it any cleaner?
- Some features like My Account, Tagging, Ratings and Reviews are not implemented yet. This strongly confirms my impression that this product was pure vaporware when I first heard about it.
- If your session times out, you get some nasty popup message informing you of this fact.
- On bib pages, there is a results scroller but unlike the popular choices one, this one refreshes the whole page for no apparent reason.
- They have done nothing to make the opac more search engine friendly. In fact, the title of every page is “Encore”. Yeah, that’s useful.
The Ugly
- All 3 of these sites look the same; are there no customization options with this software? Having a catalogue that looks just like other libraries’ will never fly at our library.
- The default design is not particularly attractive; these guys need to hire some real designers and stop letting their coders do the design.
- Look at the button to the right of the search box. On the home page, it is on a green background. Now look at a search results page. They have recycled the same button but now it’s on a white background and looks all jagged and crappy.
So, although this is beta software, there are enough promising features to keep watching this product. Hopefully, by the time it is out of beta, the problems cited will be fixed.
I’m still much more impressed by the effort being put forth in Open-ILS (Evergreen).
Of course, but that requires switching ILSes which is a big step. Since we’re a III library, Encore is just an additional software/hardware purchase so more likely to happen in the near term for us.
Ah, good point. Since our library system is a consortium and we’re one of the larger libraries, the option to jump ship has always been tempting, so we have a slightly different advantage to at least “window shop”. In all likelihood though, the conversion of databases would probably prevent that from happening. Oh well. At least your ILS provides you with some web APIs.
Good luck with III/Encore!
It’s definitely not a done deal. We’ll be considering all our options including things like aquabrowser in the near term and evergreen/koha in the long term…
Oooh, I’ve never heard of AquaBrowser, but after reading about it, I think I’ll mention it both to our library director, as well as our system administrators. Thanks for the tip!
Yeah, AB has its good points too but again I think the customization (in terms of design) seems to be limited which is always going to be a concern for us…