iGoogle Tabs, Continued: Health Sciences Libraries

In an earlier blogpost about iGoogle, I promised to share links to some of the special tabs I created as examples for my class. I am going to put each one in its own post so that if people add tools or make changes they want to share with others, they can post their links to the update on the original post and we can all benefit!

One of my colleagues here, Whitney Townsend, is the person who started this tab. Most of what’s in it is her work. I need to give her full kudos for being the person who got this whole idea started! She is brilliant, creative, and hard-working. It is an honor and a pleasure to work with her.

What I did was to change the theme, add a new books feed for our library, add in one of our blogs, a little personalization to go with our marketing. There are more blogs from our HSL librarians here, but I don’t know them all. I’d love to blend a stream from all of them, in addition to a separate one for our news stream. This is an example of using the iGoogle tabs as another way to promote the other good work you are doing. Anything that generates an RSS feed can be put in the tab. I am sure we will be revising this again, and this is purely my own personal attempt — this is not yet up to specs for being pushed out as an institutional resources.

There are things I would like to see added. Our library has done a number of videos and screencasting tutorials. I want to see those put in a YouTube channel so we can add a video gadget to the tab. We have podcasts and presentations that are in iTunes, but again, to get them into the iGoogle gadget, we would need them to be in a YouTube channel. So, pushing that angle a bit. For this tab, we included just RSS feeds from just a few of our most popular journals. These are ideas, but I bet we could look at that more rigorously and refine that part. I have put custom PubMed searches in other tabs. Here, I would like to see a really good search focusing on our institutions authors.

We’ve been blessed with a really talented grad student who is working with us — Hung Truong. He has helped make gadgets for both Facebook and iGoogle. One idea he is working on right now is a Plain Language medical jargon translation tool. What we have here is an alpha version, very rough, but even so still useful enough that I am utterly delighted. You will hear more about that through official channels when we have a final version available. I can hardly wait! It is going to be an amazing tool. Watch for it!

Click here: UM Health Sciences Libraries iGoogle Tab

iGoogle Tabs, Continued: iGoogle Tools for Life Science Researchers

In an earlier blogpost about iGoogle, I promised to share links to some of the special tabs I created as examples for my class. I am going to put each one in its own post so that if people add tools or make changes they want to share with others, they can post their links to the update on the original post and we can all benefit!

This was the first iGoogle tab I made as a prototype of what could be done. I wanted to see how it could support work productivity in an academic environment, and thought life science research was a real test of the concept. I was astonished how many tools there were for such useful functions! The Science 2.0 community and Omics researchers really have done amazing things in building and sharing tools for their work.

This tab is stuffed full of gadgets for a variety of life science researchers, so I assume people will want to trim it down to just the ones useful for them. It includes tools and information for genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, biochemistry, molecular modeling, and a variety of custom search tools.

Click here: Research Tools iGoogle Tab

iGoogle Tabs, Continued: Maps

In an earlier blogpost about iGoogle, I promised to share links to some of the special tabs I created as examples for my class. I am going to put each one in its own post so that if people add tools or make changes they want to share with others, they can post their links to the update on the original post and we can all benefit!

I’m not sure if it started when I was young and used to draw maps of imaginary worlds, or my early 20s when a friend of mine wallpapered her bathroom in maps so she would always have something to read, or later when I began crafting leftover roapmaps into origami paper sculptures, maps have pretty much always been fascinating to me. The ways in which maps serve as visualizations is mindblowing (who came up with the first map, and how did they think of it?), how people generate and share wayfinding information (and why do good instructions not work well for all people?), not to mentiont that they are just amazingly intriguing and attractive. The Maps Tools, being heavily graphic, are again a real drain on the network or processor speed. Very cool, but explore with a really good computer and network.

Click here: Map Tools iGoogle Tab

iGoogle Tabs, Continued: Astro

In an earlier blogpost about iGoogle, I promised to share links to some of the special tabs I created as examples for my class. I am going to put each one in its own post so that if people add tools or make changes they want to share with others, they can post their links to the update on the original post and we can all benefit!

We’ve been doing a lot in Second Life to support the Astronomy Theme Semester on campus, which has Astronomy on my mind. For this one, there was a real wealth of glorious tools already available, from realtime geosynchronous displays of the star patterns to find your favorite satellite. I am in awe of the tools and the folks who made them. Be forewarned – these tools take a while to load, so don’t leave this tab as your default unless you have a really fast connection. I expect you will want to pick through for your favorites and delete the rest just to save processing speed.

Click here: Astro iGoogle Tab

iGoogle Tabs, Continued: University of Michigan

In an earlier blogpost about iGoogle, I promised to share links to some of the special tabs I created as examples for my class. I am going to put each one in its own post so that if people add tools or make changes they want to share with others, they can post their links to the update on the original post and we can all benefit!

Naturally, I wanted to see what was available for the University of Michigan, and I thought a few other folk around here might be interested also. While there are not (yet) any official UM themes or gadgets actually created as part of the official presence of the school, you do find a wealth created by alumni and students. I added my own small touch by collecting some videos from the new UM YouTube channels as gadgets.

Click here: University of Michigan iGoogle Tab

iGoogle Tabs, Continued: Public Health

In an earlier blogpost about iGoogle, I promised to share links to some of the special tabs I created as examples for my class. I am going to put each one in its own post so that if people add tools or make changes they want to share with others, they can post their links to the update on the original post and we can all benefit!

I’m going to start with the one for Public Health, since they hosted the class. For this one, we went out and hunted down the best public health journals we could find that had RSS feeds for the Table of Contnets. What was surprising were the leading titles that did NOT have feeds (hint, hint).

Click here: Public Health iGoogle Tab

iGoogle for Tracking Swine Flu

Last week I did a workshop on iGoogle for personal and professional information gathering. Then, boom!, there was a national health emergency declared. I was receiving all kinds of emails from the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health and National Library of Medicine. The emails are all chock full of links and widgets and information, and say please help us get the word out. Well, I thought, why not iGoogle? So I did.

iGoogle Tab: Swine Flu Information Tracking: http://tinyurl.com/dg7s38

I already posted this much over at the UM Health Sciences Libraries blog (Swine Flu Information via iGoogle Tab. Information on how to add the iGoogle tab to your account is in that post. For the readers of this blog, I’d like to talk a little more about what went into it.

iGoogle’s strength is really in collecting gadgets/widgets, RSS feeds, media, information sources; allowing us to brand or create a custom look and feel for the ensemble; and then putting it all right in front of our faces where we live.

Step 1: I started by looking for existing iGoogle gadgets in the areas of public health, disaster planning/response, and influenza. I also browsed everything I could find from the CDC and NIH, selecting from that set.

Step 2: I looked for RSS feeds to include. These included official RSS feeds from the same sources as well as other sources (such as the World Health Organization, HealthMap and Vertect). I made sure to include Twitter feeds where possible, since I found the main rss feeds from places such as the WHO tended to be laggy and didn’t always work if you had a slow connection speed for your network.

Step 3: I actually did this last, but it should have come sooner in the process, so I am putting it where it SHOULD have gone. Here I looked for CDC videos on influenza in general and swine flu in particular, then made a YouTube gadget to drop in. iGoogle has a few tools for building quick gadgets of certain types. A short playlist of YouTube videos is one of the easiest. I also took the CDC page on flu prevention and put those items in the iGoogle list generator.

Step 4: Look and feel. I made a theme. I started by looking for a theme, but I still find it hard to find good professional appearing themes for many medical topics. I looked at a pig, but decided that was too cute. Instead, I hunted in the Public Health Image Library (PHIL) for images of swine flu, took one of those, and snipped from it to create the thematic image used as the banner.

To share this with others, in the tab edit menu there is an option for Share. Following the instructions in that, I sent myself an email with the link, including my own settings, clicked on it, and copied the link from that browser window to use in the HTML coding.

I hope this helps other also make use of this useful tool for rapid dissemination of information resources.