Friday’s JISC/CNI meeting had a distinct theme of getting content out to the users, wherever they happen to be, rather than expecting users to come and spend time on our carefully-crafted websites. We had a meeting of members of the MIMAS bibliographic team members yesterday, called by Jane to talk about issues surrounding personalisation in online services, in preparation for a meeting about it that she’s going to next week.

Jane showed us Netvibes, which allows you to personalise your own Netvibes page with a range of news feeds, search boxes, images from flickr.com and so on. It’s pretty easy to develop new modules for this service, and we’ve made an Archives Hub search box available for inclusion, if you’re a user of Netvibes. This is basically the code for the search box that’s already published on the Hub website, with some extra Netvibes-specific code wrapped around it. This is just an experiment really, but presenting services within users’ own environments seems to be an increasingly important way of reaching out to them.