Librarian app in Facebook
I was a bit disappointed last night after reading Steve Lawson's post, Facebook to library apps: drop dead. I had been playing around with some of the apps being developed, hoping to be able to leverage someone else's idea for use locally. It sounded like the "good folks" over at Facebook were back to their old tactic of our way or the highway.
I had been half following some of the discussions on the FacebookAppsForLibraries page. It appears that the "problem" with some of the federated search apps created is that they display on the profile. Web search boxes are in violation of the terms of service to build an app. If things hold, it appears to be okay if search boxes appear on the application page.
This morning I read Ken Varnum's post, Getting in Their Face[books] and discovered the Librarian app created by Brad Czerniak. I spent about 40 minutes playing around with the widget code sample Brian provided to allow for customized content to appear on the Librarian's application page. I used our space to display search boxes for OhioLINK's Quick Search, our catalog, and the OhioLINK catalog. It is not pretty because of the 200×320 pixel "widget" box size limitations, but it does work. I'm going to play around some more and see if I can get the search boxes to look better.
Brian's app made it very easy to put our most heavily used resources in our students social networking space of choice.
