Web OPAC
- Web OPAC
Web OPAC
The concept of Web OPACs is the recent origin and it is serving as a gateway to the resources not only held by the respective library but also to the holdings of other participating libraries without to local collection but going, beyond further to regional, national, international levels. It allows users to interact with documents stored on computers all over the world and makes easier access to catalogue data in the form of bibliographic records. It becomes another search engine-referred as ‘web cat‘ and as an ‘Information gateways’. It can support protocols such as telnet, HTTP., FTP, and Gopher and support the file and document like Portable Document Format (pdf), (HTML), etc.
According to Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science defined as: “An Online Public Access public catalogue (OPAC) that uses a graphical user interface (GUI) accessible via the World Wide Web, as opposed to a text-based interface accessible via telnet”.
Features of WEB OPAC:
The important features of Web OPACs are:
1. It is accessible through the internet.
2. It is possible to search independently by Author, Keyword, Title or Year.
3. Displays complete bibliographic information as appeared on reprints.
4. Features of traditional OPACs such as storing bibliographic and sometimes full-text databases; providing direct access to a library’s bibliographic database by means of terminal or PC; search result in readily understandable form; reference help, etc.
5. It has the ability to use hypertext s to facilities navigation through bibliographic records.
6. Linking to full text when available is there.