LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

I can see the potential of using Second Life as a resource for Libraries to provide services, but I'm not to sure how I feel about using Second Life right now. I have a failry decent computer, a macbook that is less than a year old and DSL internet, but it moved so slow! These types of resources have to be targeted to specific audiences because in my mind Second Life is a niche thing. There are interesting lectures from poets, book groups, and even international reference suport, however, if I could do those things in my "first life" - I would.

Like David Lee King describes, personalized start pages are an exciting possibility for library patrons.  They offer a great resource for not only customizing the patron's web experience but, more importantly, customizing their experience with their home library's website.  SDCL (my library) has a "My Account" feature which offers basic information about recent requests and borrowed items, but it is minimal in it's ability to continually encourage me to engage in the library.  Subscribing to search term feeds (my exciting discovery from week 4) w

Speaking of personalized home pages, have you seen the new BBC homepage where you can choose the news you want on the front page of the BBC site and move widgets around with drag-and-drop ease? It's pretty interesting. Hard to know whether people will actually take the time to personalize it, but it's certainly easy to use. What I like is that it seems to remember your settings without needing to create an account or share any personal info (it must do it through cookies). Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Mashups are actually pretty fun.  Really, I spent more time playing with the flakes than actually putting it together.  It could have been better though.  I was a little upset that you couldn't change the width of your columns.  A better page flow might have come about had I been able to adjust each module.  You can modify it but I guess I'm so used to coding pages from the ground up that it's frustrating to not have that control.  On the upside, it's user friendly and doesn't take a programmer to personalize.  If I were less picky about my layouts, I'm su

This is for Melissa

http://code.google.com/gme/

I think it might be beyond our (or my) abilities, but it is still cool to know what is out there.

Well, I wanted to go with Yahoo! Pipes for the exercise because I've been fascinated with mashups for a while now.  Fascinated with and afraid of, actually.  The creation of mashups seemed so mysterious and confusing, but definitely interesting.  Mashups seem to be a very sensible way to use the web.  The information is in more than one place; it will be more helpful if it is consolidated in a certain way; therefore, let's put the information into the position where it will be the most useful.

I decided to go with Yahoo Pipes (thanks to Melissa). After watching the video, Pipes seemed pretty straight-forward until I started to deviate from the formula it had used in the example. It was fun trying to figure out what would work and what didn’t but I wished they would have provided more examples in the video about the other modules and what they can do for you. I looked at some samples and tried to make sense of it all but it took me longer than I first anticipated.

I really like the idea of a customized start page for a public library, especially for a large library system with many different branches. Each start page can be geared toward to the patron's interests and the patron's prefered branch. There is a lot of potential for this, and I would love to see a library front page that knows my peculiar interests as well as Amazon.com does.

I read Melissa's review of Yahoo! Pipes, and so I got curious.  I made a simple pipe for my band's shows and locations.  This was relatively easy to do, and I can see how this application could be used for things like Library news and events, or if there are lectures around town.  Then I thought of an even better idea.  I used Yahoo!

Programmable Web is THE site for mashups. They also have a blog where they feature lots of interesting new mashups available out there. I don't subscribe to Programmable Web because a lot of the mashups they mention aren't particularly useful to me. However, it's a blog I check out every once in a while to see what's new in the world of mashups. They find some out-there mashups I'd probably never have found otherwise.