The old personalized web portal wars may have been bloody, but the concept is obviously here to stay. My Yahoo, My AOL, even serenely uncluttered Google plays with personalized searches and feeds.

So why wouldn’t an academic library offer a similar service? A one-stop expandable agglomeration of the kind of information a prof might want to check, such as

It would take a good amount of integration and design, but we know that feeds and links can be custom-ordered on one page, a page rich in day to day concerns, a page seamlessly blending a user-defined mélange of data.

Here’s an up & running start: North Carolina State University’s My Library , which brings library account information together with course information, and promises, in the near future, to mix in journal alerts & personal link collections.

A tool for making collections accessible via web portals, the Internet Scout Project’s Personal Toolkit, is worth taking a look at along these lines. It’s a Mellon-funded open source project geared towards “discipline-based” collections. The D-Lib description of the project lists the following features: