Project Plan Post 1 of 7: Aims, Objectives and Final Outputs of the project

The project will build on the success of the iGoogle widget developed by Cambridge University Library to produce a number of widgets delivering access to library content within social networking sites and VLEs in partnership with the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies. It will explore opportunities for making content delivered through widgets relevant to the user by linking to course-codes held by the student registry. The project will assist the wider take-up of widgets for library-related content by making the code for the existing widget and those developed through the project openly available along with documentation and guidance.

We will deliver a portfolio of fully documented widgets released under an appropriate open source licence, which will work across iGoogle, Facebook, and Sakai (our institutional VLE) as far as technically possible. We will aim to deliver as many widgets as possible which are found useful in user testing, and to open up as much appropriate and useful library content through the widgets as we can.



Our project outputs will be:

1. Widgets for: reading lists, past exam papers, lecture handouts and other course teaching content, and connections to other library content, delivered to students for their own courses using the student information system to create relevance information

2. Software code with full and clear documentation for the Cambridge University Library iGoogle widget
3. Guidance for libraries on code development for library widgets
4. Recommendations for future development path for library widgets
5. Project blog (which you are reading!)