What's MyLibrary? Eric Lease Morgan (a pioneer in MyLibrary work at North Carolina State, now at Notre Dame) says it's a "user-centered, customizable interface to collections of library resources." Think of MyLibrary as a personal library portal. The concept has been around for some four years, and more than three dozen libraries have implemented MyLibrary and similar systems. The Library and Information Technology Association's Top Technology Trends Committee noted in January 1999 that "Library users who are Web users ... expect customization, interactivity, and customer support." Given the excitement over MyExcite, MyYahoo, and so on, MyLibrary seemed like the obvious next step. WHAT DOES MYLIBRARY DO? Personalized library portals can include quite a few features, among them: * Academic libraries may provide scores of databases and thousands of full-text electronic journals. MyLibrary can show a user only those databases and journals that suit the user's personal profile, reducing the overload. Sophisticated implementations could look at user search patterns and journal use to improve the profile and provide even more personalized service. That same profile can yield "pushed" results--identifying what's new and personally interesting in the library's print and electronic resources. * MyLibrary centralizes the user's library information--what's out, holds ready for pickup, Ariel-delivered articles--and makes renewal and other processes straightforward. * MyLibrary could be a user's home page with other Web links and could potentially add collaborative filtering--where MyLibrary suggests worthwhile items to a user based on previous reading and reading patterns of other users. (Think Netflix or Amazon.) * MyLibrary could be a set of building blocks integrating library services into the user's MyCampus or My Worldview page.
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