Walking Paper

Last month Tim Lauer at his site Education/Technology posted an interesting bit titled Inward / Outward Aggregating about personalized homepages (e.g. netvibes, google ig). In his post he takes the concept of the personal start page, collecting hand selected data from disparate sources (generally via RSS feeds) and displaying them in a useful format, and thinks of it as applied to being a school’s principal. He’d like to see “…content such as my school’s average daily attendance; a daily listing of absent and tardy students; GPS routing information for our school busses…” when he opens his browser. This resonated with me, and I’m interested to hear what pieces of information Reference, Readers’ Advisory and Circulation staff would like to see on their homepage. My job would be facilitated if I could see:

• the day, week, and month’s most requested book, locally and system wide
• the meeting room schedule for the day and week
• important news from the library, community and the world
• reference queries that have come in via email

Library web folk could benefit from a start page to monitor their web presence, bringing in:

• web stats, highlighting pages that are popular
• pages that have bad links
• conversations going on about the library (blog searches, flickr comments, del.icio.us tags)

These things aren’t entirely impossible to aggregate. The most unrealistic thing for me, the ILS stuff, would be really simple if there was vendor support for XML.