Some Australian library catalogue widgets

Some Australian university libraries have written code for catalogue widgets and gadgets. The widgets and gadgets can be loaded to a blog or an iGoogle page. You can find them by doing a search within iGoogle, then go to Add Stuff, Search for gadgets, then search for "libraries". I did find some Australian library catalogue widgets including Deakin and UWA. The other top spot to look for widgets is the Widget Box . See my previous post What are widgets for more info or widgets and gadgets.

What are Web Widgets?

RobinGood has 5 really great short videos on What are Web Widgets? Well worth a look via YouTube, even if you just see the first one, you will get a good idea of what widgets and gadgets are all about and why libraries should be taking notice. University libraries can provide widgets and gadgets as a way of placing content in areas outside the main library website. The library catalogue widget is one obvious example.

Unconferencing again in Perth in '08

You may have attended last year’s really successful Library 2.0 Unconference at the State Library of WA. This year the Unconference is again, organised by a band of enthusiastic volunteers. The events is FREE and the theme is Library 2.0 and beyond: getting our hands dirty. Don't miss it.

For full details see Kathryn Greenhill’s complete posting on Libraries Interact or check out the Unconference Wiki

DATE: Friday 22 August 2008
TIME: 9:30am - 5pm
VENUE: State Library of Western Australia
REGISTRATION: Opens 1 July 2008

You can subscribe to the RSS feed for changes to the Wiki and become involved by joining the Google Planning Group. Details of the 2007 Unconference are on the Wiki, so don’t get confused. The 2008 program will evolve in the usual Unconferencey way over the next wee while.

The Horizon Report 2008

This time last year when we started this whole Learning 2.0 Training program with staff at ECU Library, one of the first landmark reports we read was the Horizon Report of 2007. Now the 2008 Horizon Report has been released.

The yearly Horizon Report is one of the major reports outlining technology trends in higher education. The report is put together by the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative . Each year the report seeks to define a research agenda by selecting six practices and technologies for particular attention. The 2008 Horizon Report highlights the six areas of:

grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence, and social operating systems.

You can download the 2008 report, and all the Horizon reports going back five years, from the Horizon Project Wiki

Resources mentioned in the report are tagged “hz08” and can be accessed on Del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us/tag/hz08

Go to the Talis blog for a podcast interview with the New Media Consortium gurus about the 2008 Horizon Report.

Anzac Day 2008

There was a lot of activity around the Aussie blogs on Anzac Day

On the Matilda Australian literary blog Perry Middlemiss posted a poem by C.J. Dennis: The March - Anzac Day, 1928. Perry has been active on the net in Australian literature for over ten years now.

On Club Troppo there was a wonderful photo of a kid draped in an Australian flag

Here on the West Coast the surf was up. Just a few weeks back in this same Indian Ocean they finally found the wreck of the HMAS Sydney, which went down in 1941 with the loss of 645 young lives. Read the story on the Australian War Memorial blog

I couldn’t help thinking how lucky those surfers were, enjoying Anzac Day 2008.

A group "sandbox" on iGoogle

Although iGoogle is not normally used for group work, it can be done. Some ECU academic staff have tried a novel way of using iGoogle as a group "sandbox". They use the sandbox to share work and try out new Web 2.0 applications. To do this you just need to set up a Gmail account and then establish an iGoogle page. For this to be effective you would need to keep the group small and ensure that no one changes the password!

Trying out iGoogle

After much prompting from my colleagues I decided to give iGoogle a go. I'm not sure I really am an iGoogle fan. You can put all you put all your RSS feeds together on your iGoogle page, but you can do that anyway on Firefox and the new IE. It is great to be able to use the fun widgets (Google calls them "gadgets"). My favourite gadget is the world webcam which flips over to a new live cityscape every 3o seconds, so you can empathise with those stuck the Tokyo traffic jams, or marvel at the city lights of Stuttgart. The only downside of the world webcams are the camera night shots of ... well nothing but the dark.

At the CAVAL workshop recently Richard Wallis was saying that he has two separate computers: one that has iGoogle on it and one that doesn't. The iGoogle gives him quite different and more relevant Google search results due to the cookies. If you use iGoogle for some time on the same machine this will happen.