[WEB4LIB] Re: Personalized Library Pages

[Dan Ream]

Hi Thomas  (and others)--

We have thought a lot about the use of cookies with VCU's "My Library"
project and have, for now at least, rejected the idea, because most of our
students/users access our pages at public, shared terminals and wouldn't
want to be "cookied" (is that a word? ;-)) into someone else's
customized page. Neither would I want someone else "cookied" into mine.

I understand that Eric Lease Morgan was looking into using optional
cookies for his NCSU My Library service, but I haven't followed up on his
progress with that.

I believe that some commercial sites, such as Yahoo, are using optional
cookies, but I have no off-the-cuff examples to cite.

If anyone else has a good solution to this, please share it with the list.

--Dan Ream
  Head, Instruction & Outreach Services
  Virginia Commonwealth University
  Richmond, Virginia



On Fri, 28 May 1999, Thomas Dowling wrote:

> I'm curious if anyone developing a My Library page could comment on the
> decision to require users to log in to see their customized settings.  My
> gut instinct tells me that has just enough nuisance value that people may
> create a profile out of curiosity, but not actually log into it very
> often.  It seems like judicious use of persistent cookies could make user
> customizations appear automatically, and I've been working on a prototype
> that does that for the OhioLINK home page.
> 
> 
> Thomas Dowling
> OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
> tdowling at ohiolink.edu
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Dan Ream <dream at saturn.vcu.edu>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at webjunction.org>
> Sent: Thursday, May 27, 1999 10:18 PM
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Personalized Library Pages
> 
> 
> >
> > Carl--
> >
> > Jimmy Ghaphery and I did a presentation about personalized library web
> > pages at the Computers in Libraries conference back in March. You'll
> find
> > links to most of these projects on our web page at
> > http://www.library.vcu.edu/mylibrary/cil99.html
> >
> > Our own personalized "My Library" project is accessible in demo form at
> > http://www.library.vcu.edu/mylibrary/test.html
> >
> > --Dan Ream
> >   Head, Instruction & Outreach Services
> >   Virginia Commonwealth University Library
> >   Richmond, Virginia
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 27 May 1999, Carl Merat wrote:
> >
> > > A while back I believe there were some posts about libraries that were
> > > offering a way for the end-user to personalize the library's homepage
> when
> > > they accessed it. I'm having difficulty accessing the
> sunsite.berkeley.edu
> > > archive site right now so I thought I might ask if anyone can refer me
> to
> > > those sites?
> > >
> > > Carl Merat
> > > Technical Services Librarian
> > > Liberty University
> > >
> >
> >
> 
>