I visited the University of Virginia last week where I spoke about the future of the catalog. This was more topical than I had realized when I agreed the subject with my hosts! When I arrived, the first thing that people wanted to talk about was Roy Tennant! The second was Worldcat Local.

I mentioned that Worldcat Local would go live in a beta version this week at the University of Washington, and indeed it just has. Check out the library home page, and the about page at UW Libraries.

This is a result of much work by colleagues in OCLC and at UW.

Of course, UVa is a focus of Solr developments and have mounted the Blacklight prototype with UVa data. Here is Bess Sadler:

If you were at code4libcon you’ve already seen Erik Hatcher’s initial foray into the world of indexing library catalog data with solr. I am pleased to announce that the unofficial UVa team we’ve assembled has come even further with that effort, and for the next couple of weeks we are demonstrating Blacklight, UVa’s solr based faceted OPAC. (Solr? UVA? Blacklight. Get it? Erik came up with it. Pretty clever, no?) [Solvitur ambulando » UVa Blacklight - faceted browsing and prospect]

I like those pie charts. Coming back from the trip I was also interested to see Ryan Eby's list of Solr implementations.

Things are moving along ...