What do you think of the idea of libraries creating public start page portals?

My library has a rather busy and difficult to navigate home page and being a large county system there are many branches and a lot of information (which can be overwhelming) on the site.  Rather than wading through all of this information to find what is pertinent to one particular branch or area, a library portal just may offer a more streamlined approach.

The way that I think my library should use a portal is to offer local and branch specific information on tabs. Tabs for local, adult, children's and teen areas would allow patrons to find what they are looking for more easily. At least in theory, they may find a many tabbed information portal to be just as overwhelming as the current library home page. I hope not, especially if we were to utilize YouTube video tutorials to help orient them to the features and benefits.

I get a lot of patrons asking me how to get to games sites and what sites are kid-friendly. The browsers on our patron computers have no bookmarks or saved settings other than loading the library home page when the browser is launched. Having a tab for games on the library portal would offer these patrons exactly what they are looking for! Also, having a searchapalozza page like I put on my Netvibes page would mean they wouldn't have to type in Google first thing when they launch the browser and it would showcase other searching options. The library home page has  homework resources and helpful links but they can be hard to find, not if the page is linked to from the portal.

Basically, I think that it is definitely worth a try for libraries to create public portals on their patron computers. For outside of the library it may not be as beneficial but the portal can be bookmarked to make it easy to get to even if it is not set as your browser's default homepage.  I think, as a way to personalize content for a small branch in a large system there are great benefits and also to aggregate content for a small city branch a public portal may also be beneficial.

The biggest hurdle is that, for my library system, I think they would be very unwilling to let us have a separate start page from other branches. Sad, but true. They aren't much with jumping in to new technology with both feet, they tend to hang back and wait until everyone else has joined in and tested it out first before adopting something new. Did I mention they don't seem to have RSS feeds on the home page? And it's a "newly redesigned" page that just went live a few months ago too!

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