Google Calendars

Google Calendars wasn't working well on Friday, so I had to wait until today to play with it. The result is so neat, I just hope the other librarians will buy into it. It is so easy to set up, then you can simply embed it somewhere on your Web site. You can even choose if you want a week or month display as the default.

I want to use this as part of an advertising "campaign" to let more students know about the 8 extra computers we have in the library classroom. They are available for use whenever there isn't a class scheduled in there, but students don't know that. This way they can check to see if the room is available before they bother to come to the library.

I didn't think anyone would want to know where individual librarians were, but apparently some librarians have been using this for a while to make their schedules available to students. I suppose that Iris is at a school with more office visits and less sitting at the reference desk. Here, we don't have very many office visits and we spend lots of time out at the reference desk.

It's so great to find blogs that talk about things you would like to do, but also embarrassing when you get so excited in a post about something you want to try, and find out people were doing that years ago. I am trying to become more technologically aware. This is a big adjustment for me, but also for my library. We are often ahead of the curve when it comes to new technologies, but I haven't been able to get anyone else here excited about widgets, iGoogle, RSS, blogs, and other easy technologies with so much potential.

I'm also regretting having been a bit hot-headed in my judgement of WebFeat and federated searching in general. I still think it would confuse the heck out of a student who is good at database research, but it will be great for those who want databases to work like google. Plus I love what Villanova did for their quick-search box on their library Web site. I want to do that on our Web site... but must wait until this summer to find out if our budget (for federated searching) got approved.