Tame the Web alerted me to the Dublin City Libraries Pageflakes experiment.
Take a look at it for yourself. I am a big Pageflakes devotee, and I absolutely think Pageflakes has utility in creating specialized online environments in libraries and other organizations.
But (you knew that was coming), this page is being used as this top-level home page for all public terminals in the Dublin City Library. You sit down at a computer there and login, and this is what you will see. Notice that there is no direct search for the catalog on this page (a link is there). The only search box on the page is for Google. Will this throw off patrons? Are they really leveraging their own resources in this page? It would be interesting to know what their feedback is.
I used to work in a lovely, sylvan public library, and my guess is that a page like this would create general confusion for many of the patrons there. My assumption is that public library patrons (and perhaps, one could say, most library patrons in general) expect the library home page to be primarily a branded, inwardly focused mechanism, linking and providing search options for library-centered tools. That's not to say that a home page can't point toward freely available tools, simply that there should always be a relevance (and perhaps a communicated relationship with library resources) in linking to them.
I think that this page has potential, but (in my opinion) right now it is far too focused on freely available tools like del.icio.us, Yahoo!, Google, Flickr, etc... We can't forget to leverage the opportunity that a library home page provides (particularly those within the building itself) to highlight and make easily available library resources. It is a marketing tool and it is some of our most powerful real estate.
That said, it's an interesting, boundary pushing experiment in trying to blend traditional library home page content with freely available tools, resources and information.
What do you think?
