I can comfortably say that I learned a LOT yesterday.

For 4 hours yesterday afternoon I sat in a typical conference room at the Hyatt (busy carpets that look really easy to clean, high ceilings, modern art knock-offs that remind you of something semi-famous but you aren’t sure what) and listened to Paul Betty and Erin McCaffrey of Regis University Library guide us through an in-depth how-to session about building widgets, google gadgets, search plugins for Firefox and Internet Eplorer, the LibX toolbar, and Facebook Applications.  Now you can learn how too.

This was an ACRL event.  I really love it when I, a public librarian, get to attend events related to academic libraries.  Academic libraries have a clearly defined user group; the students are something of a captive audience.  Often students have paid a lot of money to attend the school, and this really drives innovation at their library.  Public librarians should watch what goes on in academic libraries because there are opportunities to adapt innovative ideas to the needs of our patrons.

So…. Here is the meat of this blog post, friends. Readers really need to thank Paul and Erin, because they agreed to let me link to their wiki in this blog post. Following this link will take you to pages and pages of instructions on how you can do all of these things at YOUR LIBRARY! Take some time, make a library widget that your patrons can add to their igoogle page, make a search plugin so that your library catalog shows up in the browser as a search option right next to Amazon, build a Facebook app so that patrons can search for library resources without ever leaving the comfort of their profile.