Virtual book displays

Today TC had a perspectives chapel on social networking. Afterward David Whited said he hoped the chapel was merely the beginning of a campus wide conversation on the role of technology in our lives.

That got Rebekah and I thinking about how as librarians we could aid that discussion. Among other things we discussed coming up with a list of resources that people interested in pursuing the topic may wish to consult. Rebekah thought it would be great if we came up with a variety of types of resources (and I think that is a good idea) but I've been working on producing an online bibliography that would be graphically appealing. I've been experimenting with Library Thing (LT) and if you look at the margin of this blog you will see a list of books that I was able to create using LT. Unfortunately I can't get these books to link to our catalog from this widget but we could create a web page that included links and also had these book cover images supplied by the LT. I think that would be kind of cool :)

We can create different "widgets" based on tags of books in our Library Thing library so we could have different pages with different displays. In the future I think it would be great to work with the chapel office and the faculty panelist to provide resource pages for the perspective chapels. Maybe eventually we can facilitate campus dialogue on these pages as well.