A new widget and a new gallery!

Over the past few weeks we've started a "production line" of widgets where widgets start off life as ideas, become prototypes, then emerge as demos and gradually develop into more finished products. Watch this space for more news about some of the other widgets we have in "incubation" in the production line.

The first new widget to emerge from this production line as a "beta" release is a Reference List widget - this displays a list of journal citations and allows the user to filter them by various criteria like keyword and author. This could be used as a handy way for a course lecturer to disseminate the References relevant to various lectures within a course. It is powered by public JSON feed from a Google Spreadsheet which makes it easy for non-developers to maintain the source data. I'll blog a bit more about how this widget works in a later post.

In the meantime, I've set up a quick and dirty Gallery Page to show off our widgets as they emerge from the production line - you can see the Reference List widget in action on there, along with the two other widgets that are in a ready-to-demo state (see earlier posts for more about them). The widgets and the Gallery Page itself have some rough-edges which we'll tidy-up in the coming weeks but for now you get a flavour of what we've been up to. We also hope to supplement this demo page with a more "directory-like" page, a bit like an "app store", which will tell you more about each widget, and allow you to add the widgets to your own portals (e.g. Facebook, iGoogle).

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!)