A couple of months ago I was introduced to the Jackson Library IE toolbar, and since then have purchased a toolkit called Toolbar Studio to help me develop a similar one for my distance students (not an endorsement for the product, it’s just what I did). It’s fairly easy, but I haven’t really made the time to work on it much. In the comments section of that post Gianluca Drago pointed towards a toolbar he had made that works for Firefox, and he coded it by hand! Lots of good links on his page if you’re up to trying this. And today I learned of another library toolbar that’s in the wild thanks to the Digital Reference blog.
Link: Harris County Public Library – Internet Explorer Toolbar.
Does anyone know of more examples of these?
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3 Responses to “Harris County Public Library – Internet Explorer Toolbar”
Another example is the toolbar created for KnowItNow, Ohio’s virtual reference project. http://www.knowitnow.org/toolbar/
Hey thanks Don!
I don’t know of any other examples of library toolbars, but I know of a Firefox library sidebar: the Experimental CISTI Research Sidebar — http://stephen.homeunix.org/Tech/firefox/firefox.shtml — as reported by Science Library Pad — http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2005/02/experimental_ci.html”
In the meanwhile I am still working at my toolbar and I’ve made some improvements:
– added an Options popup where you can choose which buttons and search-fields to show/hide on the toolbar
– added a button to each search-field to expand/contract the field
– added history to search-fields
– added a Maldura context menu: if you select some text in a webpage and then right-click on it you can choose to search for that text in different Opacs.
And I’ll add some more useful links to my extension download page.
Ciao,
Luca