This may be obvious, but: Having used Millennium this summer at one internship, and using Horizon now at my current internship, one of the most important features of an ILS/OPAC that's been driven home to me by the contrast between the two systems is a flexible, powerful, and intuitive search interface.

Horizon is really awkward in terms of how limiters work. For instance, you can't limit to multiple collections at one time. This is annoying if you want to, say, search for books but don't care about whether they're in the adult or YA collections; in that kind of case, you have to perform two separate searches. And the ways you can further restrict a search you've started are weirdly unhelpful. You can't search within results for some obvious things like title or author keyword (I think -- I am not actually at work right now so can't double check if these are the specific missing fields). You also can't search in multiple fields at once (e.g. title contains x and author contains y) unless you want to do a general keyword search.

I do think that it may be possible to do more flexible searching in Horizon using command language (? sorry if that isn't the right term, library school student here!), but I have not yet had the time to learn how to do that, and honestly, with a patron standing there wanting an answer ASAP, I'm not sure it's reasonable for me to try to construct a query in that time-consuming manner -- especially when they won't be able to understand what I'm doing.

So I would say it's probably a good idea to give the searching capabilities of the system a good road test before you commit. I have much more difficulty finding materials at my current internship than I did at my previous one, and I honestly think it is mostly due to the fact that Horizon is much harder to search in than Millennium.

On a less pressing note, I often wonder if it is ever going to be possible to have an ILS that has a minimally attractive interface on the librarian's side.

One feature that I would love is for an easy way for patrons to find books, for the system to recommend similar books, and for the catalog to provide rss feeds of new books, but be able to break that down by genre and subject. I would love to be able to show our patrons, here are our new Science Fiction Books or Gardening books, but break it down in rss. That way we could post those on to the webpage or have an automated email for interested patrons so they know about books they would like without the library having to do anything.

I really liked Polaris for some of these features. They did rss for new books, music, and movies and then patrons could go in and save a search and have new results emailed to them. It was a bit too cumbersome and I would prefer something where we could divide that rss ourselves so it can be automated and we adjust it to serve our patrons.

This is a huge question. When we were writing the RFP for our new consortia system, we spent many brainstorming hours on this topic & generated a lot of specifications.

What it really boiled down to, is making sure that your system is as flexible and customizable as possible -- as it is never possible to predict what you'll want to deliver in 1,2,5 or 10 years time. A good question at the demonstrations is "How could our customers change what they see? - can they limit the results (by what elements?) can they sort them? can they export them?

Another good thing to do is to brainstorm what sort of service you (as a customer) would like to receive from your library. [slightly off topic, but my experience has been that unless you have a really active and switched on customer panel already established, the librarians will come up with much more 'out there' recommendations than your customers will.] Do remember that your catalogue is your best outreach tool. What could/should you be doing to 'save the time of the user' (Ranganathan rules!) It's also worthwhile looking at the customer experience of related resources. Try the websites of museums, galleries, and event centres -- what do they do for their customers that you could copy or adapt. And then extend these ideas. So you want RSS feeds of new books by genre. How about option for automatic holds placed by author, or subject or genre & then notify borrower (who can cancel if not required). [I would love my library to offer this service!] How about a customised "recommend a book" feature - suggesting titles the borrower might like, based on their reading history and demographic (market segmentation) Start with a service, & then work backwards to the functionality you require to support the service. It's also good to make sure that all of the modules interface in one place for the customer -- s/he should be able to check the status of items issued, holds placed, ILL requests, personal reading history, 'wish' list, recommendations for purchase & library events [just to cherry-pick a few] all from a single point.

Finally, make sure that the data that you need for your new bells and whistles services is reliably in your catalogue and/or your circulation database. e.g. How do you identify your genre fiction? "Mystery" is probably a bit too broad for that new service possibility. Perhaps you need to have more sub-genres recorded "Cozy mystery" "Hard-boiled mystery" "Historical mystery", etc. If you want to recommend books 'on the shelf' in the local branch, do you have accurate home branch locations for your customers.

One of the most common requests we get is from patrons wanting the whole list of our DVDs or Music CDs or Audiobooks. While that is a fairly simple search for a librarian, it can be confusing to patrons. I like to have some customizable visual search options on the main search page that we can set up so that patrons can get to searches like that (or summer reading lists, or holiday items) with one click and without needing to understand format or boolean searching.

If only a catalog could offer more helpful alternate spellings, closer to Google's "did you mean" options when you misspell words in a search. Our opac does offer alternate spellings, but they are frequently gibberish and don't provide different/better/more search results, thus being as ineffective as the originally misspelled word. It's embarrassing but also a necessity to first look up what the patron is asking for on Amazon or with Google to get the correct spelling, then look it up in the catalog.

This is a huge question, and one that we are working on over the course of years! Our schools use the OPALS system, and appreciate the alternate spellings, as mentioned above, symbols for different material types so that CDs are quickly identifiable from books, and now our students can rate the books they read! The one to five-star ratings show up in the item details, and comments can be viewed with one click.

Also convenient is a direct link to databases and Internet sites on the same topic as the search. One stop shopping for students doing research!

I would love to have a link to audio clips and audio reviews in each listing, so that students could preview titles that are interesting.

The Library Catalogue currently in use by TAFE Queensland, Australia, is called Spydus... One of the most important features in this catalogue is from the Library Staff Member's perspective... I can search for anything and everything... As and example, I can start by looking at all the items which are on loan, overdue lost. I can then look within that search for borrowers who have those items on loan, and within that search for the borrowers who have not yet been invoiced. Or, I can search for all equipment available to be borrowed, search within those results for equipment which has had a booking placed on it, refine that search to those that are booked for today, by campus. There is nothing that I can't search for, and find, within the Library Catalogue... that I like. :)

My biggies would be:

Effective basic keyword searching

Ability to set a lot of limits if you need to - esp. limiting by availability, format and location (my current OPAC is not doing this well at all)

Ability to provide a good mobile phone-friendly interface - this is a growing area, and it's really handy to search the catalogue from within the shelves. This should also be compatible with screen-reader software.

Ability to make cosmetic changes as you need to without too much pain - renaming things for clarity, change colours/logos when your organisation's marketing team have a change of heart.

Link to Google Preview - often allows readers to view the first chapter.

Any tools you can think of to make things better for users: Alerting service for saved searches eg. weekly email of new titles, view borrowing history, save records to look for later....