Indexing OPACs
Increasingly, OPACs are seen as a repository of information that may be searched via a web search instead of (or as well as) via its own search interface. If the OPAC is run out of a database using PHP and MySQL, for example, the records can be rewritten with 'real' URLs and be indexed. An example of this is at the Fitzwilliam Museum (for example record see http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/opacdirect/2811.htm). We do not index these locally as there are 90 000 records and we do not have the spare capacity in our indexing licence, but they will be indexed by Google, when it gets round to it (see http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/robots.txt).
