BiblioCommons

BiblioCommons began not as a software company, but as a nonprofit youth literacy initiative. Co-founder Beth Jefferson was interested in the ways teens were using emerging technologies to engage with popular culture and wondered how youth literacy could be improved if a social context around reading could be established online. The perF!nk Project (Perceive. Feel. Think) that emerged won a national award from the Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) and began attracting broader attention – particularly, from libraries.

From perF!nk to BiblioCommons

Asking questions, the team began to explore the potential leverage of the public library’s online catalog for the end user. Could they create conversation and engagement where people already were, in the library’s web catalog?

The perf!nk project caught the attention of the Ontario Library Association, which committed research funding. Over the next 18 months, BiblioCommons conducted surveys and more than 100 one-on-one interviews in four library systems to explore the possibilities for re-envisioning the library catalog. Three Canadian provincial agencies were sufficiently impressed with the research and resulting vision to fund prototypes, and ultimately to purchase advance subscriptions. Their early commitments enabled BiblioCommons to build the envisioned services and roll them out to interested libraries in those jurisdictions.

From beta to production

Following 18 months of user research and a year-long beta test, with six libraries, as well as ongoing research and feedback, BiblioCommons created prototypes of the BiblioCore catalog and improved scalability, usability, and configurability before rolling out to broader audiences.

BiblioCommons re-launched its re-designed services to several large systems in late 2009.

BiblioCommons also offers other modules and products that work with BiblioCore for public libraries.

Biblio Summer Sites is a suite of micro-sites that can be added to a library catalog to create summer reading groups for kids, teens, and adults. The sites have customizable avatars, badges that can be won or awarded, reading goals, reading challenges, and quizzes.

BiblioWeb is a complete content management system for library websites.

BiblioCore replaces all the traditional functionality of the library's online catalog and integrates it with discovery and interactive experiences that library customers experience daily elsewhere on the web. It replaces the traditional library OPAC (online public access catalog).