Here’s another non-class-related post but newsworthy nonetheless. It’s also a nice illustration of the power of the blogosphere at work.

Flabbergasted!

That’s what I am after reading about John Blyberg’s launch of the so-called “SOPAC” or Social OPAC at Ann Arbor District Library. You might remember that I mentioned them previously for their radical use of blogs throughout their library web site.

The SOPAC basically takes some of the best features in social networking and applies them to the library catalog. Reviewing and tagging items in the catalog, searching across tags, users, and ratings…very, very cool.

I can’t do justice to the product, so here’s Blyberg’s blog post about his creation (beware of that screencast…the file is big!).

And of course, I came across the whole thing from Librarian in Black’s blog. She calls attention to what I would call the open-source smackdown of Innovative’s new Encore product.

I sense that the library world will feel the ripples out of Michigan for a time to come. Will the world ever be the same again? Or am I simply being over-dramatic? Time will tell…