What If The Library Would Offer You Pennvibes?

Right now, I can only offer our own Netvibes Universe DIGICMB at www.netvibes.com/digicmb.

• You still HAVE to make your own Netvibes account by yourself and copy all relevant newsfeeds or searchboxes into your own personal start page. (Well, you could ask me to create this account for you or your department, if you really want to try. Let's hope not too many will do this. It's not my job to offer this kind of service at all .... ;-)
• You also still have to remind yourself that you need to login everyday in Netvibes, instead of just login once in your uni network and get there automatically.
• You COULD bump into all kinds of weird stuff, get stuck trying to get help or support, because not many know about rss, widgets and gadgets inside this organisation and it is NOT an officially supported service (always beta, right?). I even don't know what our IT-departments would have to say about this, but -for this- we do not need them anyway. They would probably say: better not, and try and convince me to forget it, or to choose another platform. (well,If you REALLY get stuck and want to know more, I COULD help you out and EXPLAIN how things work, and maybe, just maybe, make your work/study more easier and efficient.

But what if your Library could offer you a complete ready-made personal online startpage to start with, right on the moment you start to study or work within this organisation?

• No logging in at some weird, free internet web2.0 company, but being transferred to your own page by just logging into your network, just once?
• being abled to arrange your own items, and create your own content, unlimited by network restrictions
• use PubMed Search right from that page from a searchbox, or any other search tool for that matter
• To be abled to add widgets from the e-learning tool, the Calendar, the webmail, your to-do list, your contacts ....
• to access your research data from within this start page
• to get tailor-made alerts for all types of data.
• ........ ánd being abled to choose ANOTHER personal startpage tool if you would prefer that, because all these items build as Universal Widgets, abled to exchange within the available and future platforms..

Now, I do not know if Pennvibes does ALL that stuff yet, but they sure do get pretty close to what, I think, we should try and make available right here. Thanks WoWter for showing this example page. I am curious to learn more.