Fontys Library Portal

First of all, I'm not sure what the deadline is for the Mashing Up The Library competition. I could'nt find a deadline anywhere on talis.com, so I guess I'll be allright for 2007.

I would like to submit the library portal at fontysmediatheek.nl that I made for Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. The library portal is a combination of a weblog, wiki and iPort (the last one holds our databases and provides federated search).

On the weblog, which has al lot of the web 2.0 whistles (tags, RSS, tagcloud, ...) we have over 50 informationspecialists submitting library and educational news on a daily basis. The weblog also pulls information from the library wiki, so readers of a certain topic get to see which library databases could be relevant for them to use. In the wiki, which was basically build to hold all library-background information, a lot of good stuff is happening. Our librarians use it in many different ways; showing off their collection of periodicals, they build special interest pages, new arrivals, newsletters, information literacy workshops and more. We even hooked up our contactpages with the Google Maps API (which makes those pages a lot less boring to look at).

Very important to us is what we call 'multiple ways of access':
- content as glue
- embed the library in other platforms (using RSS and other techniques)
- 24/7 access
- development of tools (a.o. library toolbar, library RSS reader)

Instead of explaining all of this in a lot more words , you may just want to take a look at the slideshow I put online at my personal blog (sorry, no time for a screencast yet).