23 Things are Go!

Cam23 is officially underway, and in my excitement I’m jumping the gun by blogging about Thing 1: iGoogle. I confess that I adore iGoogle. It panders to my childish side with entertaining widgets, to my visual appetite with colour and images, and to my inner control freak by allowing me to reorder my page elements with click-and-drag ease.

Here’s my home tab, which has RSS feeds that keep me up to date with UL and Cambridge University news. It also reminds me what month it is and lets me know what I should be wearing (assuming I remember to look at the Weather tab). For pure enjoyment there’s an XKCD feed and a nod towards my secret life as a penguin, which happens in the dark outside working hours …

I also have to confess that I love my iGoogle as it is, and so I’ve already deviated from Cam23 instructions by not adding the COPAC widget. In a hasty bid to regain the moral high ground I explored the ‘optional extra’ suggestion of looking at other start pages, and this has really piqued my interest in their potential for libraries. The Unquiet Library at Creekwater High School, which boasts a seriously trendsetting librarian, has a really appealing homepage hosted on Netvibes. It’s colourful, dynamic, and user-friendly, with information presented in clearly delineated chunks.

Closer to home, thanks to Darren Bevin for letting me know about the Lewy Library’s Philosophy@Cambridge page, also on Netvibes. It’s fantastic to see a range of citation tools being made available, and the ‘Journals – latest issues’ tab is droolworthy. Looking at this page makes me feel libraries are truly moving forward into the 21st century.

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