Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton-Jan

IL2009: iGoogling with the Library
Speakers: Jason Clark (Digital Initiatives Librarian) and Tim Donahue (Instruction Librarian) from Montana State University Libraries
MSU Libraries started by creating some simple iGoogle applications and then expanded into creating many more library applicaitons. In this way, they could choose which research tools to put forward on their own customized pages.  They have close to 15 library-based iGoogle gadgets currently.  Quote: “Here are our Google gadgets – build your custom iGoogle page.”  They hand-created a webpage with 9 of the gadgets that they are promoting.  http://www.lib.montana.edu/tools/gadgets.php

One question they addressed is: “What do you gain by putting the Google logo on your homepage?”  For them, it serves as a message…that Google is something relevant and something they are familiar with.  Their gadgets include:

• a catalog search gadget
• databases search gadget
• librarian chat
• Flickr badge
• a street view tour of MSU
• MediaHub account content
• Wikipedia map for MSU
• MSU Libraries “subject map”
• Feeds

They have been using code from the templates they’ve found for search, Flickr, street tours, and other content.  They aren’t only pushing out library information, but also info related to their students’ experiences on campus in general (mappping).  One of the ideas they mentioned was the possibility to have a library-iGoogle-gadget-heavy page be the default browser page on public access computers (Sarah’s note: you could do this on your wifi network as well and have this be the splash page instead of or in addition to the boring poilcy or “hello, you’re on wifi!” pages that we all seem to use now).  Clark has also posted his catalog search gadget code on his website.  http://www.lib.montana.edu/~jason/files.php

IL2009