A couple of months back , I wrote a post entitled Creating custom search boxes for library use. This is one of my top 10 most popular blog posts and also one of the posts which I’m most proud of because it is one of my few posts that I feel is pretty original.

In that post, I figured out a way to create search widgets/boxes for practically any database, which can be embedded in many places including subject guides.

However since then, circumstances have conspired to make the post a little out-dated

Firstly the example given on Scopus, no longer works as Scopus changed their urls. That of course is easily fixed. Secondly, I figured out a slightly better way to improve the stability of the widget.

A more stable search widget?

You can read through the original post again on how to create a custom search-box for EconLit (via OVIDSP). At the risk of quoting myself
“I have being a big fan of Opensearch plugins since I discovered them and I even created a big bunch of them here for almost every database we support on various platforms.

Once you have created a opensearch plugin, you know exactly what format the url should be sent to get the result. For instance, I know that to send a keyword query to EconLit (OvidSP) with the term TEST, you should send the following string.

http://gateway.ovid.com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/ovidweb.cgi?T=JS&NEWS=N&PAGE=titles&SEARCH=TEST.mp&D=econ ”

– Creating custom search boxes for library use

The slight improvement to this would be to send the following string instead,

http://libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/login?url=http://gateway.ovid.com/ovidweb.cgi?T=JS&NEWS=N&PAGE=titles&SEARCH=TEST.mp&D=econ“

Both methods should work, but I’m told that the later string would avoid caching problems.

So the rest follows as before and so the final code you should use is as follows

If the javascript above looks tough to understand, refer to the original post again, it isn’t really that hard to understand and modify.

Conclusion

So there you have it, my improved custom search widget. If you know a bit more javascript you can do more fancy tricks, for example selecting 2 or more searches from a list and search them in different tabs comes to mind.

Summary

Google reader has introduced two interesting features, “share” which allows uers to share interesting feed items to users who follow you on Google reader (or to the shared item page) and the newer “Send to” feature which allows you to send interesting feed items to be posted on various services including delicious, facebook and citeulike.

These features are useful, particularly when reading full feeds of normal blogs where all information on the feed item is available within Google reader and the decision whether to share can be made immediately. But this isn’t the case for feeds of research alerts from say sciencedirect or a typical journal table of content feed. In most cases, you would need to go to the vendor site to read more before deciding to share.

Even if one could tell just from the research alert rss feed item that the item is interesting enough to share, one would still typically need to click on the feed item to go to the vendor site to download the full-text, and to export to citation manager.

So one would need to vist the vendor page anyway.

I suggest that one can install Better GReader which loads the vendor page in Google reader itself. This allows you to work within Google reader all the time. You can download full-text, import citations into your citation manager, share with users all without leaving Google reader!

Introduction

In a prior posts, I talked a lot about use of RSS feeds for research alerts, particularly in “Aggregating sources for academic research in a web 2.0 world“. The idea here was to use your RSS feed reader has a discovery tool, before importing it into your citation manager.

The workflow would be as follows.

1. Click on rss feed to view what’s available.
2. If article appears to be interesting, click on it to go to the article on the vendor’s site, eg. ScienceDirect, Web of Science etc to see full details.
3. Download the full-text. If you have not treated the RSS feed using the method I described here, you will need some method to handle ezproxy links (see post here showing 5 different methods).
4. Import the citation into your reference manager.

This work-flow requires that you leave your rss feed reader to visit the vendor site and then carry out steps 3,4 there.

But is it possible to actually do all that without even visiting the vendor site?

Using Better GReader to view all contents in Google reader

Yes! You can handle all this within your rss feed reader without even visiting the vendor’s site if you happen to be using Google reader to read your feeds and in addition install Better GReader.

Normally you would click on the title “Financial Market Volatility and Primary Placement” and a new window/tab would open and you would be brought to the vendor page.

But with Better GReader installed, this would be shown instead as the page loads within Google reader

From there you can download the pdf directly (I’m assuming you are using the method described here or are using Zotero’s auto-proxy function)

You can also export citations normally. Incidentally this works fine with Zotero’s normal citation export as well (click on icon in the url address bar).

Google reader’s send to feature

But what if you want to share the item with friends using other methods? You might want to share it on a bookmarking site like delicious, send to social networks like Facebook, or even to blogs like Blogger, Posterous etc. Normally you would use a bookmarklet, but as you might expect it doesn’t work here using this method.

This is where Google reader’s new send to feature becomes useful. “Send to” feature allows you to send selected articles to various places from social bookmarking services like delicious, to blogs like Blogger, Posterous, to social networks like Facebook, MySpace, to microblogging platforms like Twitter and more.

As the send to feature is customizable, there has being an explosion of ideas, with people using the feature to send stuff to Evernote, rememberthemilk addtoany, google bookmarks , sharethis and more here and here.

But possibly the most exciting is the ability to send to Citeulike – a free web-based citation manager. The instructions are here.

As Citeulike and Mendeley (another free citation manager which has both web-based and desktop versions) are collaborating this means it will link to Mendeley as well.

So if you use either of the two has your citation manager, you have a quick way to send articles to them as well.

Somewhat related is that you can share/share with note interesting articles with users who follow you on Google reader.

Whether it’s a librarian sharing with a patron, or researchers sharing between colleagues, or a student sharing with his supervisor, this can come in handy. What if the person you are sharing with does not use google reader? No problem point him to the google shared list page
which is a webpage that lists all your shared items.

Sharing items and the ability to transfer items to citation managers etc within Google reader are very useful features, but as mentioned before the research alerts received via RSS are partial feeds, in other words, they show only some minimal information, and you would definitely have to visit the vendor page itself to get full information.

Certainly you can’t download the full text from within your RSS feed reader, so you would definitely need to visit the vendor site. Similarly, chances are you would like to read the article first, before you shared with others.

So ideally to take advantage of the two latest google reader feature, you would need some way to read the article (or at least look at the full details) on Google reader , without leaving google reader.

And I just showed you how.

Credits

The idea of using Better GReader came from “sphoke” posting in the zotero forum.

Haven’t had much time to blog this weekend, as I was busy running a pilot survey for my Phd (more about that in the future), but I will just share 2 wild/random ideas I have about email.

Gmail and LibX

In my last post, I talked about how LibX is very useful, for acquisitions work, in particular how it can do autolinking of isbns.

“Any page with an isbn is recognized and converted into a clickable link. Clicking on it will do a search of your library catalogue. It even searches related isbns (different publishers, different editions) if your opac supports that or lists related isbns in a sidebar that you can search with another click if your opac doesn’t.”

Say you subscribe to various book alerts like Blackwell collection manager’s enotes, and they send you attachments (rtf, doc) in email. On receiving them, you would like to click on the ibsns given in those attachments to do a direct ISBN search of your catalogue, but unfortunately the Libx autolinking of isbns works only with actual webpages, so getting them in rtf, doc format doesn’t help.

What’s the solution? What you can do is to subscribe to those mails in your gmail account, then when the mail arrives click on “view as html”, which will open the document as a html page.

Why do so? Simple, so LibX can work its magic.

Now just click on the isbn and you can do a isbn check of your OPAC!

Want to buy the item? Just copy and paste to your email (rtf or html format) and send it to the acquisitions department, and the acquisitions department staff can verify again by clicking on the link (Why do they need to double check if you checked it already? One reason is that between the time you checked the catalogue and sent the email and the time they received and processed it, they might have ordered it for someone else already)

Google’s “view in html” works for not just Word documents but also excel, pdf, ppt etc. A common thing often done is to search for a bunch of items from your integrated library system (ILS) using a certain search criteria (say all items catalogued last year and circulated at least 5 times), then export the results (which will almost always include isbn or Marc field 020) into excel. But if you want to look at those items you would have to manually cut and paste the isbn etc into your opac to search.

Instead, email it to gmail, then use the same trick above, and you will see all the isbns are links already!

Another interesting option would be to view/convert such documents in Google docs or one of their competitors (Zoho, Buzzword, etc), since they are web-based with the corresponding benefits.

In fact, besides the LibX functions there are several functions that are accessible only when viewed in html, these include IE 8’s web accelerators, various Firefox addons that add searches to the context menu etc, so viewing a document in html can actually be quite useful.

Use Xobni for tracking email

Many libraries use a Outlook account to handle user queries. By using Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards) a free plugin, one can access Xobni analytics, which helps to quickly answer the following questions.

In terms of mail volume, when are your users emailing you. How many percent of them email you during the weekend? How many percent do it after office hours? Does mail volume vary across the year?

In terms of response speed, what is your libraries’ median response time to a mail? Does this vary much by hours? (Typically it does, mail received before office hours say 7 am obviously have a slower response time). Does this vary by day of week or across the year? (Again it is obvious response time is typically slower during week-ends if the account isn’t manned those times). Are you meeting your service level targets?

You can filter results by person, subject, domain, folder, context and more

All this is very helpful to decision making, for example if you find a spike in emails received after midnight say during April (just before assignments are due?), you might consider setting up a night shift to answer emails during this period?

Is your response time noticeably slower for certain questions? Particularly, you might find a class of questions that are commonly received say after office hours or on friday nights and which require answers that cannot wait until office hour begins… Which could be a source of dissatisfaction.

Xobni also has Facebook, Linkedin and Skype integration. With many libraries establishing a presence in Facebook, (even Library of Congress has one!) due to the rapid rise in popularity of Facebook and a smaller number providing support via Skype, Xobni is the ideal tool. For instance, a user emails you to ask a question, use Xobni to instantly offer to “Friend” him with your Library’s Facebook account.

Or instantly find his skype account and communicate with him via Skype.

Note : There might be privacy concerns if you use Linkedin, Facebook related features.

Conclusion

That’s all for this week. I hope you found some of the tips here useful. BTW, my blog is now 6 months ago (it’s genesis dates back to 24 Feb 2009) , would like to thank readers for their comments and interest.

Technical services in libraries which encompasses back-room work like acquisitions, document delivery and cataloging are often deemed as the less ’sexy’ part of librarianship.

Yet, satisfying and even delighting library patrons depends critically on having an efficient and effective technical services departments which explains why many libraries are embarking on projects to streamline and improve their services. While the biggest gains probably come from radical redesign, some gains can be gotten from minor changes. In this post I will share some ideas to do that.

Librarians have being introducing tools like Libx toolbars, opensearch plugins, bookmarklets greasemonkey scripts (ezproxy script, amazon script) etc but the focus always seems to be for library users.

But it occurs to me that such tools are even more effective for technical services work.

Libx for instance automatically converts any isbn on a page to a clickable link, and clicking on it will do a xisbn search (it searches not just the given isbn, but also related isbns) of the item in your catalogue. While this is no doubt useful to users, one suspects that a typical library staff assigned to say acquisitions would use this dozens if not hundreds of times in the course of his/her work for checking orders that come in. Though each use saves them probably 5 seconds (not to mention reduces errors), the time savings can add up when they process thousands of books a year.

Another advantage of using opensearch plugins or Libx toolbar in technical services is that they can serve as a pilot, before you push it out to users!

Opensearch plugins

Obvious idea, add opensearch plugins for sites you use often for cataloguing, purchasing etc. This could be anything from your own library catalogue to other libraries like British Library, Book vendors, jobbers (Amazon, Blackwell books, Bookfinder, BookData Online etc)that do not support z39.50

You can also add sites that handle journal abbreviations such as JAbbr etc.

This is particularly effective if you need to do the same search a dozen times across different sites.

Say for instance, you need to process a request for document delivery. You need to

1. Check if the article exists in your collection and if not
2. Check your vendors to see if they have it to place an order.

Let’s assume you don’t have a openurl resolver and you need to manually check the source title against your OPAC.

Set up, the opensearch plugins for your library opac and other vendors/libraries you use in Internet explorer 7 or 8 or Firefox. (Tip : Add to searchbar Firefox addon makes adding new search providers a snap in Firefox)

Copy and paste, the source title (issn would be better, but most users don’t give you that), into the searchbox and then select your library search. After checking it doesn’t exist, you then click on the pull down button again and select the vendor you are checking (e.g. CISTI). The search results will appear.

If they don’t have it, continue with the other vendors down the list.

Notice how you don’t have to cut and paste the same search manually several times, just select another search provider and the search is run! Internet Explorer 7 is pretty handy in the way it handles opensearch because the search is automatically run with the terms in the searchbar whenever you change search providers.

You might notice that I’m actually using Firefox in the video. Firefox users who want to achieve the same effect should install “search on engine change” addon.

There are various other firefox addons that allow you to do even more interesting stuff, in particular you can do a search such that it searches the same term across several search providers opening a new tab for each.

Try Firefox search sidebar (search several search providers at one time) , searchwith (adding searches to your context menu) to search multi-servives at one time. This is a very cheap method to achieve a poor man’s federated search.

Install Libx

The Libx toolbar has a host of useful functions. But probably the most useful one of all would be the autolinking of isbns. Any page with an isbn is recognized and converted into a clickable link. Clicking on it will do a search of your library catalogue. It even searches related isbns (different publishers, different editions) if your opac supports that or lists related isbns in a sidebar that you can search with another click if your opac doesn’t.

Say you get a book order for a certain title. You typically search your catalogue first to see if the book already exists, then they search vendor sites to look for pricing, availability etc.

If you combine* the use of Libx and opensearch, you have two choices.

1. Use opensearch to search your catalogue (by title probably, isbn usually isn’t given but even if it is you probably want to check for hardback, paperback editions) then search the vendor the site. Then you can double check that the book doesn’t exist in your collection by clicking on the isbn given on the vendor site.

2. Use opensearch to search a commonly used vendor first , then click on the given isbn which brings you to the opac search of that isbn and related isbn.

#2 looks better to me. In particularly since it shows related isbn searches (american vs british publishers, paperback/hardback even different editions etc).

Using Googledocs for book orders

Did you know you can use Googledocs to create simple forms? The data will be automatically added to a spreadsheet. The Unquietlibrary uses this to create a simple form created this way for processing book orders.

How about using googledocs has a form for reporting problems with electronic resources that are down?

Using wikis to inform of cataloging subject heading changes

“Rather than having a meeting to discuss the changes or additions, as we have in the past, one of the cataloguers suggested we add this information to the wiki. As each cataloguer has a chance to read the bulletin, they can add to the list of new, changed or old subject headings.”

The cataloguing librarian

Other ideas

Incidentally, my love affair with all things library 2.0 began while I was embarking on a project to streamline technical services, so I have a soft spot for such ideas. Are there other interesting creative ways technical services staff are using web 2.0 in your library? I’m interested in hearing about it.

* Why not use Libx alone? While Libx allows you to add library catalogues, support of other searches are limited compared to opensearch plugins.

Thinking of creating interactive maps for your library? I highlight two interesting examples here.

Dynamic 2D map at WSU

“Dynamic mapping provides a customized map display in an online public access catalog for library patrons. After the patron has initiated a search and selected a particular book or other library resource, the patron is given an option to view a dynamic (or interactive) map for the chosen resource.

The dynamic map will display directional information to the patron such as the specific library branch which holds the resource, the floor of the library where the resource will be found, the specific department location, the general location of the shelving range, and a moving image display which shows the searcher which direction to turn as they exit the elevator.”– Interactive directions for holding locations in a Library OPAC.

As the video above shows, this is a very innovative system used at the Wichita State University library. It handles items without LC class, multi-level maps, eresources and many other features (see more demos here).

Dynamic 3D map at NUS Libraries

I seldom post about work at my own library, but will make an exception this time. This is a 3D interactive map offered to our users. It has a host of features including

• Navigation using mouse, keyboard etc.
• Programmable orientation tours
• Links to embedded videos – (e.g. How to use the self-check machine)
• Search by landmark
• 3d book search by call number and/or linked from OPAC (experimental)

A couple of videos for you (the new version looks a little different)

The system was done for us by PeekSpy, a company started by students and Alumni of our university. They make innovative use of Google Earth technology, and users can visit the map after installing the plugin in their browsers.

One disadvantage of this is that I believe currently smartphones can’t handle this though. You can play with our system live here.

Future possibilities

I can think of many other things to enhance library maps, one would be linking it to our university’s SecondLife community.

It’s probably too much to convert it to a full blown virtual world, though I wonder if it is possible to use location sharing/aware services to pinpoint yourself on the map. Imagine, a user contacting you via IM saying he can’t find a book, and then you say “let me come to you”, and his location is pinpointed on the map. Or find a friend who is meeting you on the map.

Another interesting idea would be to take a leaf from lifestreaming and virtual worlds (video below)

Some interesting ideas

1)Have a LCD screen? On the virtual map clicking on it might play our slides on Slideshare or Youtube videos from our Youtube channel!

2) Book cover displays might be linked to our Flickr accounts.

3) Clicking on the icon of the librarian at the desk, might pull up the eform for askalibrarian , or maybe even better the IM/Skype/Twitter account.

4)Have a last.fm account, pipe the music into the map.

etc.

So how is your library handling location maps? Please post any interesting examples you are aware of or are working on. For instance there are some campus wide orientation maps that are really innovative.

Introduction

Popular blogs

This is somewhat rare, but if you happen to be fortunate enough to be in an area, where there are relevant blogs covering the area (For instance my old research area was on measuring information quality of Wikipedia, and there were 2 or 3 high quality blogs covering research in that area), you would definitely want to include that as a source.

If you are just looking for some general reading rather than something specific, you can use the method here find top blogs and to filter/rank the results using Postrank

Social bookmarking sites – E.g. Delicious, Twine, Diigo or Social media sites like Slideshare, Scribd

The paradigm example would be Delicious.

Two main approaches here, you subscribe to relevant tags, or better yet identify people in your area and subscribe to their bookmarks (and or tags). To do the later, a very crude approach is to search for a link/paper that you feel is very relevant to your research and look at who else is bookmarking it. You can do the same for tags or better yet tag bundles

Libraries that are big on Library 2.0 tend to offer a bunch of browser plugins/addons in the effort to reach out to the users who don’t feel the need to visit the Library Portal.

They offer custom toolbars, some prefer Libx, others are big on Conduit toolbars. Many progressive libraries are big fans of the firefox addon Zotero for citation management, many more offer opensearch plugins. All of these are available as Firefox add-ons of course.

Even Librarians who just use the standard add-ons, tend to have a list of add-ons that they can’t live without and love to recommend these to their patrons.

While submitting new Firefox addons to the official http://addons.mozilla.org web site isn’t a particularly new thing, there was no way to group all your favourite add-ons together and offer them in one place.

Until recently that is when Firefox revamped their website, allowing “developers” (all you need to do is register, no programming required!) to offer customized Firefox Add-on collections.

What libraries could do is to upload their unique firefox addons onto the Mozilla addon site and then bundle them together with other useful standard addons as a collection and offer them together to users.

As always I checked to see if any libraries had this idea and indeed some had (It’s hard to have a really original idea, librarians are really creative!).

As of writing these collections include the “Law Librarian recommended Add-ons” (University of Wisconsin-Madison) , “Swem Library“(Earl Gregg Swem Library), “Copenhagen Digital Library” , “Recommended for Library staff” (Ada Community Library) .

Of them all, the first is probably the most interesting and many of the ideas here is owed to that collection. They don’t have many subscribers yet though.

Managing the collection is quite simple particularly if one uses the Mozilla Firefox Add-on Collector , as you can add to your collection add-ons that are installed in your browswer(See feature list and video demos of creating a collection and setting up a collection that updates based on your installed addons).

Below is a screenshot of how you can select add-ons that have already being installed in your browser to be added to your custom collection.

Users can subscribe to a collection via RSS feed or better yet if they install the Mozilla Firefox Add-on Collector, they will be notified whenever the collection updates.

The last is a interesting feature, particularly if you are offering your own custom add-ons and constantly update them. Do note that add-ons you offer in the collection must be hosted on the Mozilla add-on site, so you will have to submit to them first.

So what can you add to your library collection? Some ideas

Opensearch plugins

I was looking at the Law Librarian recommended Add-ons and to my surprise I noticed that opensearch plugins (known as search engine add-ons in Firefox such as this) could be added to the collection as well.

If your library supports opensearch plugins for your library catalogue and subscribed databases (customized using the necessary ezproxy link), you can submit them to be added on the Firefox add-on site then add them to your collection. See this example

Custom toolbars and search related toolbars

Many libraries offer custom toolbars such as Libx, Conduit toolbars as well as other custom toolbars for download (see examples here, here ). Those can go into your collection.

How about a Book Burro toolbar? Or maybe OCLC’s Openurl referrer? Some libraries have add-ons that display availability of items listed on Amazon. You can also add ezproxy related addons

I’m playing with a pilot/experiment WebMynd add-on that includes library catalogue results alongside the default results whenever the user searches Google.com, Yahoo.com etc and that could be added as well.

There are also quite a lot of unique custom made for library add-ons being demoed at various “Library Labs” that could conceivably be added for those libraries.

Citation related addons

Zotero is the obvious choice here. Law Librarian recommended Add-ons collection also includes many interesting Zoterio plugins I was not aware of including Zotero Plugin for MONK Project , SEASR Analytics for Zotero , Zotz .

There are also sticky note/web annotation/scrapbook related add-ons like Diigo which I favour.

Others

There’s a ton of other addons you can add to your collection, that can help making research easier or are just so useful you can’t leave them out (e.g Adblock, Autopager), see for example this list.

Definitely add greasemonkey if you are offering greasemonkey scripts.

Conclusion

One thing I’m curious about is whether it would be possible or even legal to upload add-ons that are slightly customized. E.g A Zotero add-on
with specific options setup for your institution users (e.g. Openurl resolver settings set to the correct url).

Are there any more libraries creating Firefox Collections? What do you add? I’m interested to hear from you.

As every seasoned Twitter user in Singapore knows, while one can update his Twitter account via SMS, since October 2008, one cannot get sms updates via Twitter (not for free anyway).

Savvy Singaporean Twitter users know of services like TweetSG and Widgeo, which allows you to sms a Singaporean number instead of the international number. But unfortunately, there is no way to get updates from Twitter via SMS.

No way until now at least. Enter SgBEAT . On the surface SgBEAT looks kind of pointless, it’s a Twitter clone set up for Singapore with perhaps one extra feature the ability to send pictures via MMS.

It also includes one interesting feature for Singapore users, it allows you to receive free sms @s and dms sent to SgBEAT after you activate your phone, by choosing “edit personal profile”

and then linking to your phone by sending an sms to a number with a “secret code” proving that you are owner of that number.

After that you can receive “beats” from people on SgBEAT , as well as “beat” by sending sms to that number (or sending pictures by mms)

Okay but even that doesn’t sound too exciting since not many people are on SgBEAT. But the recently released Twitter reverse link (which I was fortunate enough to get to trial before hand ), means that if anyone on twitter sends you a reply, or dms you it will not only be reflected on sgbeat, but you will also be sent an sms!

You will need to link your Twitter account to your sgbeat account first of course.

click on “edit” and then turn on the options to import tweets from Twitter

When it’s done, anything you post on Twitter will go to sgbeat and vice-versa. But more importantly, you get sms alerts when someone replies to you or sends you a direct message from either Twitter or SgBEAT!

Obviously, from the library point of view, it has the potential of becoming a cheap SMS reference service tool. Once setup, a user can tweet @nuslibraries via sms, and when nuslibraries replies via DM or @ , the reply will be pushed to the user’s phone via sms.

It’s not as good as NLB’s SMS reference service but it’s free. One limitation is that initially you get only 10 updates per day.

Incidentally at least one of the the founders of Sgbeat is a current student of my institution National University of Singapore.

First, a look at the final product.

Recently, I have being thinking about how information flows in a large organization, including libraries.

In my last post, I talked about two methods in which one could quickly aggregate critical information that are sent internally in libraries by email to a “information dashboard” (I note with embarassment that I’m probably misusing this term) .

I noted that sending mass emails to everyone’s inbox was not a good idea, because people might just miss the email. Wikis would be an answer, but it is unrealistic to expect wikis to be updated instantly upon being sent an email, and there was a need to keep track of such emails to ensure that the wiki was being updated.

My idea was to forward the email to a service that would accept input from emails and aggregate the result in a nice format. Further more, one would then pull that information and other useful information via RSS into various services such as Netvibes, Igoogle, etc. The librarian would then consult that page when on duty at service points. The first solution (using Individurls) looked like this.

The more I thought about it, the more i realized this wasn’t a particularly good idea, because RSS feeds can take 20 minutes to update and the whole idea was to be updated in as near-real time as possible.

Was there a real-time alternative? I looked at XMPP, SUP but it was too difficult.

I did talk about Friendfeed in my last post , on how one could send an email and it would update friendfeed, but I suggested that people refer to the page at the start of duty and then either refer to that page constantly or install FriendFeed Desktop notifer to be informed of new posts.

But I missed the obvious, elegent solution! Why not embed the real-time widget Friendfeed offers into Netvibes, Igoogle?

To recap, here’s my idea.

1. Set up a special Friendfeed account for internal use for the library and keep it private.

2. Then as per instructions in my last post, forward critical emails to that account so it would be updated with latest news

3. Now embed the real-time widget into Netvibes, Igoogle, etc.

4. Then add any other useful widgets to that page and use it at the service desk.

It works really well, when I mean real-time, it really means that. Send an email from a registered account to a certain email address or update Friendfeed directly and it updates on Netvibes page instantly without reload!

To do so, log-in to your Friendfeed account. Select “tools”, then “embeddable widgets” , scroll down and click “Real-time widget”. Or go to this link

If lots of librarians in your organization use Friendfeed, you might one to embed a Friendfeed group (formerly room) instead. If no-one has their own Friendfeed account, they can still use friendfeed to communicate (they will all be using the same account, more than one can be logged in from different locations to the same account), but you can’t tell who is saying what, since it all comes from the same account. A group gets around that problem.

I can’t really talk highly enough about using Friendfeed this way, as it’s really flexible. If you don’t want to look at the netvibes page or the friendfeed page, you can setup to be updated via IMs, emails, RSS , Facebook, Iphone or download their own Friendfeed notifer. You can also update friendfeed using email, IM.

So it is suitable for librarians who have different comfort levels for technology from the geeky librarian who is god at Librarian2.0, to those who just use email.

Of course, when you use AJA startup pages like Netvibes you can be as creative as you one and add widgets to centralize all kinds of information needed by a Librarian at a service point.

Some very basic ideas.

1. Search widgets

I prefer to use OpenSearch plugins in my browser to quickly search commonly used services, but for people who don’t have this habit, you can provide simple search widgets using the method I blogged about here on how to create almost any search widget with no programming or scripting skill required. For me, I’m thinking of adding search widgets to search our internal wiki for policy, telephone directory of my University etc.

2. Twitter, Meebome/Meebo room widgets

If your organization uses Twitter/Meebo or any web-based chat widget either for internal or external use, you can embed widgets for those.

3. RSS feeds

Though these do not update instantly, it does not hurt to add them. I add our own external blogs, news page etc.

One could also add the rss feeds to the Friendfeed account of course, but I personally prefer to leave the friendfeed account clear except for critical information sent through email.

4. Other widgets

I’m sure there are tons of interesting widgets one could add.

Though one can use the friendfeed widget to communicate, probably that isn’t the best use.

For simplity, I like the webnote widget from Netvibes for instance.Then one could quickly leave notes to the next officer at the desk. Perhaps even better would be something that provides real-time collobration , etherpad , googledocs or better yet the coming Google wave!

Another obvious idea you could also add online calenders, those using ical, google calenders etc.

Acknowledgements

Haven’t quite worked out the logistics, but using Netvibes, one can share the page with several different Netvibes accounts, or one can share each widget, so each librarians can customize their own Netvibe pages they want to use at the service points. Other librarians who don’t want to, can just use the default.

I’ve always being remiss in acknowledging where my ideas come from, in this case, I believe my idea was inspired from real-time blogging with Friendfeed . Also I remember seeing either a Tweet, or throw away comment by someone about using Netvibes for librarians at service points, but try as I might I can’t find it. My thanks to both for their creative ideas.

Librarians are often overwhelmed by the mass of fast moving information they need to keep track of. Particularly in large libraries for librarians manning information desks, keeping up to date with the latest changes in policy and instructions is often a challenge.

One can use Wikis, or tools like Etherpad to manually update a “news page” or to make changes to the documentation, but often the latest changes and news is propagated through email from top management who are too busy to update the wiki. You also don’t want to update the wiki with something that is of short term utility and won’t apply after a week.

In the past, I used to just move these emails into a “policy” folder but that was unwieldy. Not to mention the fact that I would often miss such emails among the crowd of other emails in my inbox.

Creating a information dashboard

A natural idea here is to try to create a information dashboard for librarians manning information desks that puts essential information at one place.

It seems to me that the information dashboard would serve 2 purposes

(1) Providing fast access to commonly used resources (e.g. common search widgets, lists of phone numbers etc)

and

(2) It would bring together data about the latest changes in Library policies, things to take note of etc.

In this blog post, I’m more concerned with (2) – a future post might address (1). What is the most effective and efficient way to manage such information? The idea here is to setup something that is light weight, easy to use for all librarians of different skill levels. Ideally they would scan this information dashboard before they started their duty to remind themselves of the latest information.

One would of course set up desktop widgets using Google desktop, Yahoo! widgets etc on the computer used at the service point, but that would not be a very simple solution. You can also have a poor’s man desktop widget using Active Desktop (Windows XP) , an idea I might cover in a future post.

The other option would be to use web-based startpages like Netvibes, Pageflakes or Igoogle etc. The idea is simple of course, get the updates you need in RSS, and then feed it into the start page.

You could get the RSS feeds of your news portal (or do screen scraping if required), calender events etc (ical to rss) and put it into whatever startpage you like.

Some other odd ideas, how about pulling in your internal Twitter accounts used for communication , so one can leave messages for whoever is taking over next?

In this blog post, instead of using the usual suspects such as Netvibes, I used Individurls – a service that displays RSS feeds. There are other choices but I chose it because of its simplicity and elegent displays.

Email to RSS

Okay it’s obvious what to do with RSS feeds and you can feed news sources if they come in RSS, but what about emails?

My institution has access to Confluence Wiki, a enterprise level wiki which allows you to generate RSS feeds of any page, including “news” pages and “mails” pages.

What “mails” does is that you set up a POP/IMAP account with Confluence wiki, and any emails sent to that email account will be posted on the Wiki.

From there, one can then generate a RSS of that mails page and pull it into Individurls (or any RSS reader or display widget). If your wiki is password protected you will need to set up your RSS feed with the user name and password string.

So all you need to do is to tell people who want to send important internal mail to cc that email address, and the information there will be automatically posted.

Here’s how it will look like.

No access to Confluence Wiki, or any Wiki that has this feature? You can try services like MAILtoRSS , or any service that accepts input in emails but can output in RSS such as Posterous. I’m sure there are others.

One thing that concerned me was the delay involved. While the email to RSS portion seems to be negligible , RSS feeds takes a while to update (and even more delay if you need to do screen scraping). I did some testing and it can take about 10-20 minutes to update via RSS.

I tried using Pingshot service from Feedburner (similar service is Pingoat.com and more here), which speeds up updates to selected services, including MyYahoo! . MyYahoo! incidently allows you to display RSS feeds so one can burn feeds using Feedburner, turn on the Pingshot service and plug the resulting RSS feed into MyYahoo! In theory, this should speed up RSS updates. But it was still slow to update in my testing.

Using FriendFeed to create a information dashboard

How about using Friendfeed? It is already set up as an aggregator of feeds and unlike RSS feed readers it displays images too. On top of that, the page autoupdates in real-time, so you can keep it open and watch without reloading.

You can also update FriendFeed using email and that will show up immediately on the Friendfeed page.

First register/update the email addresses you will be updating Friendfeed with (you can add more than one). From the registered account, you then send an email to share@friendfeed.com, and “The subject becomes your entry title and anything in the body of the email is posted as a comment. You can even attach a photo to be included in your post”.

You can also, install the FriendFeed Desktop notifer, which will pop up whenever it receives something new.

This gives you both a page listing the recent changes, as well as instant updates via a popup.

Sadly you can’t do anything about information that is aggregated on Friendfeed via RSS as that will still have its normal delay(though there are solutions like simple update protocol (SUP) that speed up updates for supported services like Disqus and Backtype) ,

One way of working

When you start duty at the service point, you go to the Friendfeed page to refresh your memory about the latest news. The information there will be updated in near real time if it is pushed via email. You can continue to monitor that page, or you can just rely on the FriendFeed Desktop notifer to update you instantly of any other changes that occur while you are on duty.

Once a month, someone reviews all the news and decides which ones if any, should be updated in our Wiki.

I suspect that there are better ways , cleverer ways to do this by chaining several services, but all this might be moot, as Googlewave might just blow them all away.