I’ve mentioned many times that I have close ties to my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, so forgive me for yet another mention of them. I have been meaning for a while to mention here that they are providing some nice social web functionality. Included in this is a library-specific toolbar for Firefox or IE (first heard about on ACRLog). My only complaint about this feature is that it joins a rather crowded group of customized toolbars such as those from OCLC and other kinds of toolbars available to everyone. What I mean is, I for one don’t like toolbars in the first place, and I particularly don’t like too much web browser real estate taken up by multiple toolbars.

Another nice application UIUC has had in place for a while is a webpage for easily creating RSS feeds from their online catalog, so that as new books or resources are added to the catalog in areas of interest to users, they are able to be automatically notified about them. I’ve put a library and information science-focused RSS link, created via this webpage, directly into my RefWorks account because this allows me to more easily import relevant citations.