Web Advisory Group

Still want to submit ideas even though the contest is over? Send email to: webgroup-lib@mit.edu All of your feedback is greatly appreciated!

Thanks to all those who contributed ideas for our web site during the contest held between May 15 and June 30. The winner was Erin Rae Hoffer, an MIT graduate student, who submitted the idea below. She won a $50 gift certificate to the MIT Press Bookstore.

 

Winning idea: There are so many people associated with the libraries with great expertise in academic disciplines, as well as methods and approaches to finding resources and conducting research. My idea would be to make it easier for patrons to access this knowledge, and to access the knowledge of other patrons in addition. How? - License expertise management technology from a company such as Abuzz (www.abuzz.com) or Ask Jeeves (see www.askjeeves.com) to enable patrons to ask Questions, and to have the Q&A results archived into a growing knowledge-store. For an illustration of this, check out Dell computer's support pages' "Ask Dudley" at support.dell.com/askdudley/

It's a great idea to provide a searchable "knowledge management" database of people's expertise in doing research or using the library resources effectively. We will be exploring this idea further.

Other ideas (selected from many)

There were many other excellent ideas contributed in this contest. A few are listed below.

• The Browsery on the 2nd floor of Hayden has a collection of newly released books of general interest. I would enjoy seeing a list of some of these on-line. Scanning in a few colorful titles would be a nice touch (a la the Amazon.com design for a book's description.)
Thanks to your idea we've done this! See http://libraries.mit.edu/humanities/Browsery/

• ... an option for users to develop their own profiles, similar to the MyYahoo, MyNetscape, MyLibrary sites that are out there. This option would allow your web users to customize their own library home page to readily access only those features of your site that they find most useful.
This is something we've been discussing. For a list of other libraries that are doing this, see: http://www.library.vcu.edu/mylibrary/cil99.html .We would like to hear from more of you to find out if this would be valuable.

• MacOS has a delightful feature called Sherlock which will search a zillion search engines all at once, summarise and prioritize the results. It is easy to write plugins for Sherlock to widen its utility. How about a Barton plugin for Sherlock?
We're looking into this one. We'd love to try it!

• Re-organize the front page into resources, rather than the individual libraries. For example, prominently display links to online journals, to Barton, to interlibrary requests, and to information about library hours.
We will be doing this as part of a total redesign of our site. Look for some changes coming by the end of 1999.

• An email service that informs subscribers of newly-acquired books that would interest them. Subscribers could sign-up via the web sites and provide their subject areas of interest.
We've also been thinking about an email service that notifies you of new databases and electronic journals that we subscribe to. And perhaps one for general news items about the libraries. We'll include your idea in our planning.

Even though the contest is over you may always submit ideas for our website by sending email to webgroup-lib@mit.edu.

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