Everyone should AddThis

While hanging out at Denver Public Library’s new Aquabrowser catalogue I noticed a wee Bookmark & Share button that allows you to send information about a record you have just found to the printer, email address, Twitter, FaceBook and many other  services.

Of course I have seen buttons like this before and mostly ignored them but as I was in “Aquabrowser Implementation Mode” I did pay attention and asked Meindert, our Medialab engineer, if we could have this functionality too.

I thought the Bookmark & Share button was part of Aquabrowser but No.  It’s a free service called AddThis and it’s the easiest thing to implement.  You configure how you want your button to look and what services you need included,  then just copy the script that is automatically generated, into your application.  Meindert had it in our Aquabrowser development server within minutes and Tony, who works in our team, liked it so much that he put it in many of the Library’s other services such as the  Scottish Screen Archive, our new Digital Archive and the Map Library web pages.

Not only does AddThis allow our customers to bookmark, organise and share aspects of our services but it also provides us with useful analytics that show usage, the most popular services and content.

I’ve been wondering if I could include AddThis in our Voyager OPAC. Tony thinks it’s do-able but if anyone else has already done this in a Voyager catalogue then let us know.  Also, I thought it might be nice to have the Ask a librarian service added as an option so may get in touch with the folks at AddThis to see if it can be included.

Until next time …

Gill

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