Thing 8: Protopage - what is it?

Protopage is an internet start page. You can use it as your own personal home page which you can access from any computer or mobile phone or you can make it public and share it with other people. If you made it public you could create a customised start page which would signpost  library users to the most relevant and reliable content on the web 

Signpost
photo by JMC Photos on Flickr
used under a Creative Commons licence

You can use a start page to bring together current awareness services such as journal tables of contents, search alerts, web pages, RSS feeds and other web content. You can include feeds from Twitter and other social networking sites (but these will probably not work inside the NHS) .

You can also add widgets which do a range of things from adding a cute puppy to your page to generating a quote for the day.

There are some other start pages which you could use if you prefer.  

For example Netvibes is very popular with healthcare libraries but does not work well with IE6 or 7. For the practical element of this Thing we will be providing step by step instructions for setting up a Protopage which does work with NHS standard browsers. 

For an idea of how Protopage can be used in a library context have a look at what South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust library services have done with their page:

http://www.protopage.com/southteeslibraries

They have a readers guide here:

http://southtees.nhs.uk/content/uploads/Guide-to-using-Protopage.pdf

To have a look at some start pages using different platforms check out the NHS Library Web Portals directory, set up by Catherine Ebenezer from Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust, 

Now blog about which start page you have decided to use and if you can think of any ways in which you could use it for yourself or your library service