Later that day...

I had a stint on the reference desk this afternoon to play around with iGoogle more; I'm still not sure whether or not it's useful for me, but there are a lot of gadgets out there. Right now I've got it set up with a handful of search boxes on the left, my Gmail and Google calendar in the middle, and the weather and one of my Twitter accounts on the right. The header image is a crop of this one, keeping just the island:



The WorldCat search box seems like it could be really useful for the 'do you have this book?' questions - rather than searching the catalog, telling the patron no, then pitching ILL while pulling up the item in the SUNY union catalog or FirstSearch WorldCat, all the information would be right there, making the ILL pitch faster. Of course, we could also use the IDS search at our library, but it's just not growing on me. (Odd, really, since I like clean-cut designs like that.) I suppose I could also be going straight to WorldCat and bypassing our catalog altogether, since we just did a reclamation project with OCLC and our catalog and WorldCat agree pretty well right now, but the FirstSearch interface is going away, so I may as well get used to the new one.

Hm... apparently the WorldCat.org local links are still pointing to our old ILLiad server. Another thing for me to figure out to fix. Back to work!