Thursday 7 October 2010

What a difference a day makes

The leaves are turning and the students are back in Cambridge. We always saw the start of this term as the real launch target for the library widget as a fully-fledged service. And taking a look at the Google analytics

our little bird is ready to fly! Guess when the start of term was ...

We've been working hard on getting the widget out there - blogging, inveigling it into library inductions, promoting at the Freshers' Fair, tweeting and generally making a nuisance of ourselves.

The embeddable version of the widget is now springing up all over the place, from our new unified Cambridge Libraries Gateway, to forming the account functionality for our (also new) LibrarySearch resource discovery platform. Everywhere you look the widget is gluing services and systems together, offering consistent functionality in a diverse online world.

We're hoping for 2,000 unique users a month by Xmas (c. a fifth of our undergraduates) and are well on the way. That kind of usage certainly makes the "real estate" at the bottom of the widget valuable property for messages and info for our users.

So it was nice to see the usage figures take off on Tuesday - 24 little hours in Cambridge can make quite a difference!