Library Stuff

Thank heavens for Kinko's!

Next week, I’ll be getting a digital camera, so look for a photoblog to start up around that time.

So, I’m in D.C. and Jenny and I just got back from a one mile walk to the closest Kinkos to make copies for our presentation, which is tomorrow AM. She took a picture of me in front of the store with her Treo and we were going to post it to LS, but I couldn’t remember the Blogger e-mail address, and we couldn’t access it from her Treo. I just sent it to her via IM, so the picture should be up soon. Also, I gave her free range to post pictures from the conference to LS, so get ready for those as well. I, for one, will be congrunting throughout the day and publishing at night.

Also, for those attending the conference, please remember to ping your posts to http://topicexchange.com/t/computers_in_libraries/ at Topic Exchange so that we can read about the conference in one weblog. I’ll try to remember to tell the organizing committee about it as well. To get the Topic Exchange weblog in your aggregator, grab this feed

A lengthy article appeared in Econtent Magazine today, entitled, Can RSS Relieve Information Overload?. Our good buddy Karen Schneider is quoted in a sidebar (scroll down), which I’m quoting here in full:

“Karen Schneider is the library director for the state of California’s library Web portal, Librarian’s Index to the Internet. As a librarian, she’s found RSS to be an invaluable research tool. She discovered RSS after reading about it in Peter Scott’s library blog. She says she quickly realized how valuable RSS could be for rapid dissemination of information while at the same time, it reduces email. “This is the year that everyone has become fed up with email and more and more content has become available in RSS feeds,” she says. In a short time, she joined the chorus of librarians singing the praises of RSS, even posting an RSS tutorial on her blog, The Free Range Librarian.”

“She was amazed at how much material was available as RSS feeds. “I was stunned at what I can pick up: National Weather service, the New York Times [and many others].” She also monitors librarian blogs through her news aggregator. She says, “I spend a lot of time reading other librarian’s blogs and feeds.”

“Schneider, an adjunct professor at the library school at San Jose State, had a student who wrote an RSS feed for her lii.org Web site as a project. She plans to go live with an RSS link from her site in the near future. RSS is a natural fit for her Web site as it changes regularly. Instead of visiting each day to see what’s new, RSS subscribers will know any time something new appears on the Web site, and for busy librarians, that’s a big advantage.”

As an aside, I’m glad to be reading about RSS in yet another InfoToday publication. Plus, I’ll be speaking about RSS this week at the Computers in Libraries conference in D.C. (an InfoToday sponsored event). Yet, I wonder why Infotoday has yet to hop on the RSS bandwagon by providing feeds for their content? I would even be willing to look at a few ads to get summaries of the articles that they already provide for free. Oh well, I guess that’s what the speakers cocktail party is for…to nudge, nudge, and nudge again.

Before reading the entire article about the city of Costa Mesa trying out RSS, printed in FCW, I jumped over to the site to check out the feeds. I had a hard time finding them (even autodiscovery failed) so I jumped back into the article and read this:

“The RSS feed is being used to publish only selected items for now, Bui said, since it’s still very much an experimental process for getting information out to people. The problem, he said, is that Costa Mesa has no means to publicize the new technology and educate people on how to use it. E-mail subscribers are being told about it, Bui said, but nothing is being done to educate the public at large.”

While I understand the need to be cautious with RSS (newbies have the right to be wary, it’s our job to teach them not to), why not just provide the feed to users so they can get some feedback? Also, I’d like to know if the e-mail subscribers were provided with the feeds, which would be a step in the right direction.