Mary Ellen Bates did her annual presentation on what’s new with the web.  This is always one of the most informative sessions at the conference.

• Google.com/squared –Works for categories of things. It creates the beging of a value added item. It structures search data in table form. “a visualization is worth a thousand words.” So, if a user was looking for arthritis drugs, Google creates a table on the fly, generated algorythmicly, with relevant information on the topic. It columnizes relevant data and allows for user overwriting. This can then be exported to Excel.
• Wolframalpha.com –It indexes systematic knowledge, so it works great for structured data. It is not so much what it finds, but what it does with what it finds. It displays datasets in a way that can be easily digested.
• Google Show options –on the upper right hand side of a results screen, you can click on show options to get a different display of search results. Images from the pages can be displayed, or more text can be added.
• OneRiot –Crawls links people share on Social Networking Site. It is indexing all of the links people send in tweets, not the tweets themselves. You can sort by realtime to get the most current buzz, or search by pulse to get the most popular links.
• Search Cloudlet –Firefox add-on that generates frequency results from your search results on the fly. It creates a word cloud on every page that is returned. It is smart enough to eliminate words that are on every single page. For example, if you search for health insurance, it won’t throw those words into the tag cloud, but it will add the word “doctor” or “health care provider” to the cloud.
• Twitter searches –There are lots of ways to “get rid of the garbage” and find information that is relevant. There are lots of filter options on the search page. Use them. Also, you can use the term filter:links to search only tweets that have links in them.
• University Channel –It is a university consortium for videos. It compiles lectures, conferences and panels. It is a pretty crude search tool on top of a bunch of good data.
• Bing.com/visualsearch –It is a search that displays results visually. So, if you search for yoga poses, you get a bunch of images that show the poses.
• Google Hacks –Set an alert on twitter (site:twitter.com) and look for the word favorites. It will pull all of the favorite links by twitterers.
• Google Domestic Trends –This tracks querries over time. You get a graphical representation of searches over time. You can enter multiple search terms so that you can find data correlations.
• Ms office tabs –create tabs in Microsoft office applications!

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Jason Clark and Timothy Donahue, librarians from Montana State University, use iGoogle Gadgets to distribute library services outside of the library. They are interested in reaching students “in their own environment.”

Their gadgets are promoted on the MSU library homepage. There are nine gadgets that they have created and posted on their site. These gadgets provide users access to library services like the catalog, databases, and library maps. Their first gadget was a tabbed search box that searches through the catalog, a metasearch, a citation finder, and Google Scholar (proxied). Their second gadget was a flash based floor map. Users mouse over the virtual stacks and they see what call numbers are on that row. They also have a blog aggregator that brings together their blog, Twitter, and Flickr streams.

For the programmers in the audience they showed how to access the source code for each Gadget. It can be found on the Gadget’s home page under the View Source link. This can be useful for establishing a code base on which you can create your own Gadget. Additionally, all of the code that Jason has written is available at http://www.lib.montana.edu/~jason/files.php

Lastly, they showed a way that Google Analytics can be used to track the usage of individual gadgets.  This data could be useful for establishing the “worth” of Gadgets.  It can then be used to convince skeptical librarians that they should direct students to the Gadget.

Internet Librarian 2009, Widgets and Gadgets Hide