Google Gadgets for Your Library Catalogue

I think that one of the central things that libraries need to focus on if they are to thrive into the future is to make it easy for people to discover library content without having to acutally visit the library. This is especially true for reference services as so much information is available on the web. I talked about this idea as part of the last Reference Seminar. The logic goes something like this...

Discovery happens elsewhere. Most people don't go to libraries as their first point of call for information. If we want people to discover our content then we need to make sure that we disclose that content to the environments that people actually use. These links point to two posts from Lorcan Dempsey's blog, where I first came across these ideas.

Over the last week or so I have been taking the first tentative steps toward trying to put those ideas into practice at my place of work. I've created a Google gadget for the Sutherland Shire Libraries Catalogue. Our customers can add a gadget to their personal Google page, blog or other web site that lets them search our collection and link to their library account. Here's a screen shot of the gadget on my iGoogle page and you can read more about it on our blog.

iGoogle Page with Catalogue Gadget
Originally uploaded by Sutherland Shire Libraries

It wasn't that difficult to do, however, if you want to give it a go you'll need to know a little bit of html. I started with this presentation from Ed Metz giving step by step instructions on how to go about it, combined with some reading from the Gadgets API and here we are.

I'm not sure whether any of our users will actually use it but it didn't take too much time to put together so I don't think it's wasted time.

It's in the Gadget directory but it's not showing up in a search yet (I'm hoping that it's just waiting for the next crawl) and I've written about it on our web site. What do you think? Any ideas for where else I could promote it?