iGoogle Gadget webinar

Montana State University has Google Apps enterprisewide

Created a variety of apps:

• Search widget: catalog, articles, journals, proxied Google Scholar
• Database widget: Can customize with top 20 popular dbs (and display 5 at a time)
• Feeds widget for library blogs, Twitter, new books, videos
• Flickr widget
• MediaHub: video, audio, etc. Most recently published one shows up
• Google maps widgets: street view tour of campus (very popular)
• WIkipedia map of campus
• Chat reference widget
• Tour widget (video on YouTube)
• Floor maps widget (Flash vector map)
• Archives widget (pictures)
• Photo album widget
• Course specific gadgets

How to make and promote them:

• Coding: HTML, Javascript, and CSS
• Widgets can be used in web pages with some modification as well
• Working on ad for front page of website during redesign
• Promoting them: Users can find through Google directory and promotion on website
• When gadget is created, submit to a directory: advertising from Google directory and main library website
• You can embed iGoogle gadgets in other things without requiring people to have an iGoogle account (as long as it handles javascript, you can put it in LMS, LibGuide, websites, Google  Wave, etc)
• You can sign up for a developer account to get a sandbox to play in 
• Google Gadget Editor: http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/tools.html#GGE
• Google Gadget Sandbox: http://google.com/ig/sandbox/
• Don't have to be a coder; can just plug and play as long as you know flash file or feed name; others require HTML/XML, CSS and Javascript skills; they make code available
• Markup and tags: <ModulePrefs>-Gadget settings; <UserPref>-User personalization (customized databses); 
• Publishing gadgets: Go to http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docspublish.html
• Add metadata to help SEO: e.g. title_url=LIBRARYLINK
• To see how it was done, View Source on existing gadgets

Best practices:

Think small apps;

• start simple (search box)
• Enter a lot of metadata
• Host your files locally (more control) and then let Google know you updated
• Use dev tools
• Monitor stats

Tracking stats (several ways)

• iGoogle dashboard: http://igoogledeveloper.blogspot. com/2009/11/launching-igoogle-gadget-dashboard.html
• Google Analytics
• iGoogle Directory stats

Pretty good stats esp. for Wikipedia map, video repository (campuswide for these); search widget;

Unique users have selected widget and put it on their page; page views is how many times people have hit it in

Demos and useful inks:

• http://lib.montana.edu/tools/gadgets.php
• http://lib.montana.edu/%7Ejason/files/gadgets.zip (tabbed search, Flickr, custom databases
• http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/
• http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/gs.html&nbsp;
• http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/fundamentals.html
• http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/publish.html
  

Other people doing this:

• Nina McHale: crln.acrl.org/content/71/3/136.full
• Ed Metz: http://socialnetworkinglibrarian.com/index.php/archive/igoogle-gadgets/\\

Future: 

• Micro-library apps
• What will happen to the library web
• Library services as widget
• Rolling your own everything
  

Contact and further help:

Jason Clark: jaclark@montana.edu; twitter.com/jaclark (latter best way to get him)

Timothy Donahue: tdonahue@montana.edu

Ask them for help and they can give 

Q&A:

Scalable to mobile? conceivably; not doing it yet but micro app concept useful for this. pieces too small to do research on mobile. No Flash in Apple settings though

Ways forward: show related dbs; push suggested dbs; maybe one search box and then faceted search

Balance between getting out of the way and guiding users

Widget vs. gadget (former smaller and universal term; latter maybe larger and proprietary term from Google)

No way to tell if specific people are accessing

Slides will be on http://delicious.com/tag/acrl-igoogle-2010