Are you using widgets?
Posted by: Sue Polanka
It seems nearly all database providers are offering free widgets these days. Widgets are search boxes embedded in a website, email, course management system, or other online source to provide easy searching and access to information. Britannica, Ebsco, Gale, Infobase, Credo Reference, and a host of others offer widgets. Sara Kelly Johns, one of the speakers at the RBB program at ALA spoke of widgets as a way she adds value to her reference collection. She and other colleagues add widgets to pathfinders or encourage students to add the widgets in personal research pages they may have created in iGoogle or other locations. Gale, in a recent publication showed that libraries with widgets had higher use of their electronic resources. Are you using widgets? If so, how and where do you use them?
