Library Stuff

The DOE Feed is already paying off. Today, I learned that there is a new E-mail update for teachers available:

“These email updates address hot topics from the Department’s teacher outreach and provide resources to help teachers learn about the latest policy, research and professional issues affecting the classroom.”

Of course, they could have also provided a feed for this service. I’m reminded of the immortal words of Paula Abdul in her mid-career hit Opposites Attract: You take two steps forward, I’ll take two steps back.

One of my new favorite weblogs, Blogs, RSS, etc, has been pointing to some great stuff lately. Today, Teri mentions that the Department of Education now supports RSS:

“ED RSS delivers headlines from ED press releases, funding opportunities, No Child Left Behind, and federal learning resources through RSS.”

Suweeeeeeeeeeeet. I’m thrilled that our federal government is finally working to support RSS for their content. They still have a long way to go yet, but at least they have started the initial foray. I know that there is an RSS Gov site (hasn’t been updated in a while), but maybe Gerry can start a list of government-related RSS Feeds.

BTW, I am so excited about the new RSS initiatives that are coming out of the library world. We need to constantly keep on top of new technologies and have done a great job teaching, supporting, and preaching RSS to our patrons, fellow librarians, and vendors (even though they only listen to us half of the time). Lets keep it up!!

I’m not sure how I missed this, but Gigalaw launched a weblog (it’s on the main site, just scroll down a bit) in the beginning of June (There is an RSS Feed). I subscribe to their Daily News via RSS and it’s one of the first stops in my morning aggregator perusal. Now I can look forward to more content from the Gigalaw staff. Great news.

Here are a bunch of neat tools and resources that have come into my aggregator over the past few days. I must be working with Gary too closely these days because my first thought was to create a list. Enjoy.

1) Gmail and GTray – Download this file and get updated on your desktop when you get a new message in your gmail account. I have it running at work and home. Great tool. (via Google Blogoscoped)

2) Search Fight – I love this one. Instead of just having search wars in Google, Search Fight will run your queries in 10 engines. For librarians, this can be a neat way to demonstrate to patrons how different search results can be.

3) Complete Guide to Weblogs – Announcements – I was browsing through Peter’s site (a person can get lost in there, happily lost I might add) and came across this announcement list, run by Quick Topic. It’s a great site to watch for those interested in new weblog tools. One problem. No RSS feed. It desperately needs one but I don’t think Quick Topic support RSS. It really really should. There is an e-mail list (which I reluctantly signed up for), but a feed would be much better. Sigh.

4) Folderblog – “A ~15kb PHP script that automatically displays the images placed in a given subdirectory. It can be used as either as a blog or as a gallery — and just about anything in between” (link via del.icio.us)

5) Gmail Addict – This blog posts bugs found in Gmail and Blogger. Worth grabbing the feed if you use both (like me).

6) Teri tipped me off to a general bibliography of RSS-related articles that are being collected by no other than Gerry McKiernan. This is probably the most comprehensive list that I have seen so far for the information professional community. I threw the site, like the others that Gerry puts out, into Web Sites Watcher, so I can keep track of any new additions. This site is another one that is begging for an RSS feed of its own.

I saved the best for last

7) The List – LBR mentioned this site the other day. It’s not just your ordinary subject guide put together by a bunch of librarians at the Minnesota Public Library. They have a page for new additions to directory. First of all the additions are annotated, but best of all, there is an RSS Feed for these new entries. A perfect use of RSS in the library world. One that I am going to point to in my presentations. An issue that I have with the “new additions” page is that they don’t have an XML button or any link to the feed. I had to find it on their RSS site, which also has a bunch of other great feeds…but it might be marketed better by placing the button on the “new additions” site.

Hip Hip Hooray!! You can now customize feeds from the BBC with this third-party resource. You can narrow the searches to the bbc.co.uk domain, BBC News or “the web”. I’m more apt to use the BBC News tool as that is likely to get updated more often with new material. I’ll run a search on both the bbc.co.uk domain and BBC News and monitor it.

Not as wonderful as the BBC providing this themselves (I hate to use third-parties unless I am forced to), but good enough for now. (link via Del.icio.us)