Check out this description of a session being presented tomorrow at the DLF Fall Forum in Philadelphia:
(taken from the conference program):
What Can Web 2.0 Technologies Do for our Library Web Sites? The Example of Pennvibes. Delphine Khanna and Michael Winkler, both University of Pennsylvania Pennvibes is a framework for content delivery and organization inspired by Netvibes, iGoogle, and Pageflakes. It is being developed at the Penn Libraries using AJAX, XML and Java technologies with the goal of creating a web presence that is drastically more responsive and flexible to the needs of our patrons. We also hope that Pennvibes provides an extensible delivery platform for arbitrary digital library content. When we go live (end of 2007), Pennvibes will enable our Librarians to build new reference pages in a few minutes, complete with custom-tailored (and proxied) lists of resources built from PennTags, integrated search tools (e.g., a Pubmed widget), RSS feeds, editable Webnotes, rotating image widgets, and a "My Library Account" widget that integrates items checked out, fines, and document delivery requests for the patron. In the second phase of the project, we would like not only librarians, but also Penn faculty and students to be able to create and modify Pennvibes pages, thereby making our Library Web site fundamentally more interactive and collaborative. In our presentation, we will demonstrate Pennvibes, outline its potentials for Library Web sites, and discuss the strengths and challenges of the underlying technology. * Please note that "Pennvibes" is an internal name that might be changed when we go live.
Wow. Wow! I wish I was there to see this. If you are in PHL at the DLF (Kevin...), I'd love to hear/see anything from this session. :)
One question about this concept in general: Is it better to develop our own portals (like Pennvibes) or to make all of our tools and content support flexible use elsewhere (ala Facebook, iGoogle, and now OpenSocial.) I have my opinion on this (you can probably guess), but I'd certainly like to hear others. And--regardless---I'd love to see Pennvibes.
Not only that, but Trevor Owens will be talking about all the new Zotero features at that same session. I'll take good notes for it!
I think the idea of a portal per institution is dead. There will be a few Big Winner portals (like iGoogle and Facebook) and everything we develop should work with them. In somewhat related news, I just applied for the Beta of Twine, which should "tie together" socially networked data to "leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your friends, colleagues, groups and teams."
One of the things they mentioned in the presentation was that, down the line, they'd like to open up all of the Pennvibes widgets so that users can put them in any portal they want. Assuming other institutions follow that lead, it's possible that a set of widget standards would emerge and people could pick and choose which ones they would want to use no matter where they came from.