Beyond the Walls of the Academy - Glenn Peterson

1. Presence
not forcing people to come to your website
showed Hennepin Library news and catalog search box in Google Reader and MySpace
"add Hennepin County Library Catalog search to your MySpace" because kids like to collect gadgets for their MySpace page

2. Search Autosensing
showed OpenSearch with HCL catalog in Google search box on a toolbar (Firefox and IE7)
- lets you put the library's catalog directly into the browser for searching

3. Pushing to Users
email alerts for titles by authors the user has self-identified interest in
RSS feed for forthcoming fiction, what you have checked out, etc.

4. Blogging in Public Libraries
showed Ann Arbor District Library
HCL has a blog for Catalog News

5. bookspace (yay!)
branded website (like Lorcan said)
a librarian in Kansas owned the domain bookspace.org and gave it to HCL (yay librarian in Kansas!)
bookspace has a blog; "win prizes" inaugural post has 26 comments on it, most of which have nothing to do with the prizes; people started talking about books there
bookspace integrates with the HCL catalog

showed comments in HCL catalog
comments link appears on individual detailed records and in booklists and in bookspace
showed a user-created booklist - "Cold Enough for You?"
very Amazon-like; lets you see other booklists by the creator

6. Scratch
using MIT's Scratch software to teach kids how to create games
is very subversive - has kids creating open source software!
showed the Scratch interface and did a demo of how you build a game
user-friendly environment and you can build in complexity as you learn it

Takeaways
- look for opportunities to extend your library's presence
- look at PL blogs for ideas that might work for you
- consider adding social features to your website that llow users to share their experiences using library resources