investigations of integration with the Microsoft Research Pane

In Serving Your Users in their Offices, The Shifted Librarian talks about what I would consider a continuation of the "live where your users are" concept, using the Research Pane in Office 2003:

Microsoft® Office 2003 Research Pane

“The Todd library now offers the ability to search our library catalog directly from within most Microsoft Office 2003 applications. To activate this new feature you will need to install our Research Service….

... You may now perform keyword searches of the Todd Library Online catalog any time from your Office 2003 Application.”

In the OCLC blog Outgoing, there is a great posting today about the concept of being Loosely Coupled, which also mentions integration with the Research Pane.

In addition to the xISBN and authority services I've mentioned in previous posts, we've started some experiments using IE's 'research pane' to expose terminologies. 

Here, the interfaces are Microsoft's SOAP definition for services that will interact with the research pane (you have to have Office 2003 to use these.  Conforming SOAP Web services, such as a thesaurus, or in our case some genre lists and a MeSH subset, can then be searched and selected, all in a sidebar within the MS Office application, such as IE or Word).

There is also a repository that supports Research Pane integration, I mentioned it previously:
2005-01-10  SOPS open source OA repository