VCU's "My Library" Project

[Dan Ream]

Happy October, Web4Libers....

At Virginia Commonwealth University Library in Richmond we have developed
a personalized library web page service that we'd appreciate some
feedback about. We are about to announce this new service to our users,
but would appreciate feedback from the Web4Lib "braintrust" beforehand.

Please go to <http://www.library.vcu.edu/mylibrary/test.html>
and create your own "My Library" page. Although the links you'll make to
IP protected databases probably won't work, you can still get an idea of
how this idea works by creating your own page and then perhaps editing it
a second time.

Our goal was to create a personalized web page service that allowed
occasional library users (like MOST students and faculty are) to place all
their favorite library databases on one page, so they could find them
easily and quickly when they wanted. We also provide a link to major new
tools on our login page so they might be alerted to new choices they might
want to add to their "My Library" selections. No longer will students have
to negotiate (and remember) 5 clicks to get to their favorite of our 150+
online databases.

Using CGI, My Library dynamically creates a personalized Web page based on
a stored "user profile". This profile is generally about 200-300 bytes in
size, so we are not anticipating problems in disk space. The profile
matches up with defined url's in the CGI script, so that when resources
change addresses, each user's page can be updated in one central location.
Likewise, we would have the ability to broadcast announcements/updates
across all of the user pages.

"My Library" is modeled after Newspage and CRAYON and "My Yahoo" and has
parallels to UCLA's "My UCLA" <https://my.ucla.edu/main.asp>
and the University of Washington's "My Gateway"
<http://www.lib.washington.edu/resource/help/MyGateway.html> 
though we found both of these latter two after we started work on our own
"My Library" project this summer.

Please give this a try and share your reactions! Comments/questions would
be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

--Dan Ream
  Head, Instruction & Outreach Services
  dream at saturn.vcu.edu

--Jimmy Ghaphery
  Instructional Technology Librarian
  jghapher at saturn.vcu.edu

Virginia Commonwealth University Library
Richmond, Virginia, USA