[Web4lib] Create a customizable homepage/site?

Thu Apr 19 10:38:07 EDT 2007

Well, first off, make sure that this is something that would be of interest to your clients.  We, ourselves, had a My Library system that did essentially that, built using ColdFusion/SQL Server (of course, any Web database set up would work). However, usage was very limited to a few dedicated users.  For one thing, it takes quite of bit of effort to truly personalize - finding and selecting the resources, especially.  Certainly there are tools you could build that would make it easier (i.e. a bookmarklet to add a site to your list), but there is still a certain amount of work that is expected to be done by the user of any personalization system.  Some people don't mind this and often go to great efforts to build a page just right.  Most, however, do not.  

So, better to find out before you build whether you have enough users to warrant the time and effort not only to build it but to keep it working and integrated with the rest of your site.  How much is "enough" is totally up to your organization.  A simple survey asking if users would be interested is not enough.  Research has shown that many more users will assert that they would use a service than who actually do.  Potential indicators include the rate of use of other similar systems (i.e. most any Web 2.0, campus intranet personalization, if any, etc.), unsolicited expressed interest in such a system, and success of such a system at other institutions with similar demographics. 

That being said, there is an open-source MyLibrary system that was developed by Eric Lease Morgan when he was at Notre Dame [see http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/ ].  Several institutions ( http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/implementations.shtml ), most notably NCState, have implemented this with varying success.  It is probably the most developed of all the "MyLibrary" systems.  

Eric has a list of other libraries which offer personalization services - http://www.infomotions.com/musings/portal-webliography/examples-education.shtml (it does include UTSW's, but this is a dead link...I've asked Eric to remove it).  

Certainly a CMS which has these features built-in would be helpful, but it should not be the driving force behind a full-scale switch.  There should be more reasons (and more support from other staff) to make such a major transition.

My suggestion is to research the experiences of other institutions similar to yours, determine if your users are ready for such a system, and, if possible, implement personalization on a smaller scale to gauge interest (i.e. only for your ejournals, or provide a small section of your home page for users to add their own links using javascript and cookies, rather than a database).

I'm not trying to squelch your enthusiasm and eagerness to try new things; I just don't want you to become jaded after you go to such great efforts to build it and no one comes.

Karen R. Harker, MLS
UT Southwestern Medical Library
5323 Harry Hines Blvd.
Dallas, TX  75390-9049
214-648-8946
http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/library/ 

>>> Caitlin Nelson <cnelson at hawaii.edu> 4/18/2007 8:34 PM >>>
Hello web4lib,

This is my first post, so please forgive me any mistakes...  My name is Caitlin Nelson and I'm currently an LIS student at the University of Hawaii.  The student Web Team is currently in the process of a major redesign of our Program website: current site: http://www.hawaii.edu/slis  new site draft: http://wwwdev.hawaii.edu/slis .  

Right now we are not using a CMS; we are using a combination of hard-coded HTML and PHPincludes to create "templates" for our pages, as well as using PHP for dynamically generated navigation. Essentially we're creating our own system of managing the bits and pieces of the pages so we can splice it all together to make a coherent site.

Now, if that were all we wanted to do, I would feel okay about continuing on as we are, but being young idealistic dreamers we keep coming up with "wouldn't it be great if..." ideas that we'd like to implement. The main example being "Wouldn't it be great if we could have a customizable site, where the person could login and have access to personalized information like bookmarks, rss feeds, course schedule, wikis, etc all right on the homepage?"

So, my question is: how do we move from the idea stage to the implementation stage? What kind of skills and software do we need in order to make this (customized page/site) a reality? Once we know more about how something like this would actually be implemented, we can evaluate the current skill-set of the team and decide if that's something we can actually accomplish or not.  I have superficially investigated some CMSs like Joomla and Drupal and have paid close attention to the discussions on this list about the topic, but still am not sure if something like a CMS would be a good way to implement these features. 

Basically, we're ready to learn what we have to in order to make it happen, but I'm just not sure where to begin.  Any ideas, advice, information will be great - thanks!

Caitlin Nelson
LIS Student UH Manoa
http://caitlin.childcarepub.net ( http://caitlin.childcarepub.net/ ) 
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