Library Stuff

Take a look at Michael’s presentation called “Big on Blogging”. I was floored when I saw slide 21, his intranet weblog for SJCPL. Wow!!!! You go Michael. As always, you rock!!!

Blogs / Weblogs in Higher Education mentions that the Daily Iowan, another college newspaper has an RSS Feed. Neat. Keep ‘em coming.

An interesting quote from this article, written by a solo practitioner lawyer:

“Within a law firm, blogs that promote inner-firm communications can be utilized as essential knowledge management tools. And when turned outward to the realm of external communications, blogs can shape the public’s perception of who is acknowledged as an expert in a given area of law. In the larger context of any law firm’s marketing strategy, blogging may be the ideal component to highlight attorney expertise.”

After having my “publicity from heaven” week at my firm, I mentioned to the marketing head (a wonderful person, very techie), that we should have a weblog on our website, for the exact same reasons mentioned above. I’ll be sure to send this article to her as further proof and inspiration. (link via Topix)

EMediaWire:

“ToolButton Inc. today launched NewslettersByRSS.com. The free NewslettersByRSS service allows newsletter publishers to continue to deliver their newsletters by email while trying out the much-hyped delivery medium of RSS. Publishers obtain a special NewslettersByRSS email address which they add to their newsletter distribution list. When the newsletter is emailed to the list in the normal course of publication, it is automatically converted by NewslettersByRSS and immediately available to the subscriber as a RSS feed.”

Interesting concept, one that has been done before (I think – I can’t remember where I saw it). A thought: If your library has an e-mail distribution list, why not offer your users the option to get the content via RSS using this site? It might be a nice method with getting started with RSS. While I haven’t used it before, it looks simple enough.

I’ve seen Reger mentioned on occasion but never had the time to really look at it. I took a quick perusal today and was quite impressed with the many features available. It’s free and I’ll probably play with it more when I get a chance. Consider this post a reminder to go back and take another look down the road. Is anyone playing with Reger? Comment below.

Dave links to this article from the Christian Science Monitor. I was most impressed with the last section:

“Although making a living just blogging is nearly impossible, a blog can have a great deal of career value by demonstrating one’s expertise and writing skills, thus serving as a “reputation builder,” Blood says by phone from San Francisco. “You can quickly establish yourself as an expert in your field by becoming a kind of one-stop source for information.”

This is exactly what I like to get across in my presentations and articles on weblogs. There are still areas in library science that haven’t been fully explored in weblog format. One recent one that has caught the attention of librarians is RFID in libraries. The neat thing about our profession is that it is constantly changing. Weblogs can fill the void (and the need) in collecting content in one place to make like a bit easier.

Straight out of my comments. The University of Kent Library has an RSS Feed for their new acquisitions. Very cool. I’m sure Jenny will be interested in this was well. Anyone else doing this? I’d love to hear from you.

Sometimes, I don’t think. Sometimes, I don’t understand the outcomes that can come from posting something on LS. Sometimes, I just post. That’s the power (and downfall) of weblogs I guess.

My Googlebombing experiment was wrong. Plain wrong. I never checked with anyone about it, I just posted. It was getting late. I thought I would have some fun…and it was wrong.

So, I ask you, as a friend and colleague. Don’t Googlebomb. The one thing I don’t want to do is cause any problems with my colleague or any other institutions that I highly respect for their continuous work in our field.

Thanks. And, if you have already contributed to the experiment, you might want to delete your posts. It’s up to you, but it would make me feel a bit better. Your call. I’m going to keep mine up for a day or two, then take it down. GoogleBombing is wrong, and just plain stupid.

Just got an e-mail from Jenny, who is on vacation. She cc’d me on a reply to a librarian who was at her session on RSS at CIL and asked that I post this.

Garry at the Kenton County Public Library has written an “SQL/JAVA program combination that queries our online catalog twice a day and creates XML feeds and an HTML page for our newly acquired adult books.”.

I’m sure that Jenny will have more to say when she gets back, but check out the page he put up. Incredible!! So, not only are the pages displayed automatically, but users can grab an RSS Feed as well. Now, only if these feeds can get broken down by author (i.e. if I want to know when the library acquires a new book by Joyce Carol Oates) or subject (i.e. I want to know when the library acquires a new book on depression). One neat thing that Garry can do is display these pages on a weblog (maybe as a sidebar to a main library weblog). I also notice that the feeds are in alphabetical order and wonder if the feeds can be displayed in order by the date received.

Two big thumbs up for Garry who is doing us RSS folk proud.

Alrighty, it looks like they are trying to bring centralized weblogs together at Arkansas Tech University. I like the concept of allowing the user to see only weblogs from the School of Education (no posts yet), the School of Business (no posts here either), or all departments. This would work well in Movable Type as well.