To deliver information to the patrons of a library, librarians must be able to select the best tools to serve their specific community. Amidst the variety of available resources built for libraries, the ability to analyze features, compare offerings, and prioritize the most important qualities in a potential software is an important professional skill. The OPAC is the public face of the library, the first and potentially only interaction with its resources that many patrons may ever have.

For this discussion post, we were asked to evaluate the OPAC of a selected library. I chose to draw comparisons between the College of DuPage’s Primo catalog, for an academic audience, and the Glen Ellyn Public Library’s Aspen Discovery catalog. Assessing how the catalog delivers its core functions, how the underlying metadata may impact its interface, and being able to explain these differences to a leadership audience could be a key part of a librarian’s job depending on their specialization. In general, being able to understand an information resource and convey its functionality to an end user is a useful aptitude in a variety of situations.