My Space -> At the library??

I keep running into personalized portal pages. Everyone has them: MSN, Netscape, even LiveJournal has jumped on board. They're nifty. I've found the LJ portal handy before, and I've customized them in several places so that it's useful, and so that it's my home page.

I love personalizing pages. I also love communication.

I have this dream of a library website that does a bit of everything. It's personalized, perhaps you get to select which databases show up in a module. You sign in and you automatically can see your checked out books, or what items might need to be renewed. The librarians keep up a blog that gives interesting information about changes in the website, databases, or new collection additions. You can save searches in your library catalog so that if you're working on a lengthy semester long project you don't have to repeat the search over and over again.

Beyond that you can choose to save books for check-out later. (How many times have you ran across a book that is of very little assistance to your current research but you really want to read it later? You can write it down of course, but inevitably that little piece of paper gets lost and later you think, what was that book? Who was it by? Did I write down the call number? And it's lost forever to the black hole of your backpack.) This library website has a "reading list" similar to Amazon's wishlist feature. Perhaps like LibraryThing's social statistics for a book it might tell you what other books people reading that book have also read.

As a librarian I use Library of Congress Subject Headings all the time, and I don't believe that any serious researcher would ever want to see them disappear. But what about personal tagging features? Language changes and LC subject headings change much less quickly. What about user generated keywords attached to librarian cataloged book records to help other users find that book or article?

There are pieces of this puzzle out there. Innovative Interfaces: My Millennium allows users to do some of these things. Yet, I have yet to see anyone pulling all of the pieces together. I think it's a market for an online library community that I have yet to see any library fill.

If you built it, the users will come.