Library Stuff

The first wave of social bookmarking tools have been implemented and are now part of daily use (well, they are in my world). The leaders IMO are del.icious, Furl, and Flickr. They all have 2 commonalities that make sense for todays online world: Open tagging systems and RSS feeds for those tagging systems. Two new(ish) similar tools that came across my aggregator this weekend are:

+ OpenBM – Very similar to del.icio.us, but they refer to the tags as tickets. Just use spaces in between keywords describing what you are bookmarking. Unfortunately, no RSS feeds.

+ CiteULike rocked my world when I first viewed it. The concept is, again, similar to del.icio.us, but it will be used more for scholars looking to collect and share articles that they see. From the site:

“CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise academic papers that they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself.

When it comes to writing up your results in a paper, you can export your library to either BibTeX or Endnote to build it in to your bibliography.”

Neat eh? I’ve already subscribed to a few feeds that fit into my research on social networks. As a suggestion, there should be a way to intergrate this into library fee-based databases. Kind of what Jenny talks about when dealing with vendors and RSS. That stuff is way over my head.

Teri Vogel has put a pre-print online of an article [PDF] on the Georgia State Libraries experience with weblogs and RSS which will appear in Internet Reference Services Quarterly next year. I’m going to print it out tomorrow and delve right in. Whenever I show off what libraries are doing with weblogs and RSS, the GSUL example always gets the most “Wows!” out of the audience. It truly is a work of art and genius. Maybe I’ll try to get them to come out to Internet Librarian next yearto show off their project…

In his column this week, Greg Hill writes::

“How I wish I, like Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, could say, ‘There is no mistake, there has been no mistake, there will be no mistake.’

However, the reasons behind the errors, the nature of the responses they engendered among bloggers and the many positives related to blogs must wait for another time.”

The links above are from me, not Greg. Everyone is entitled to making mistakes. I make them all of the time. One of the most powerful aspects of the weblog world is that these mistakes are correctly quickly by readers. I’m looking forward to Greg’s column on the positive side of weblogs.

They are blogging again at Infotoday. This time, they are covering the Online Information conference in London, which they did last year. I’m glad that they are actively persuing blogging as a medium for content distribution. Pus, Dick Kaser is posting some great pictures. One problem guys. You need permalinks for all of us to link to. They exist (I get them in my aggregator), but they should be presented after each post on the weblog.

I’ve subscribed to the InfoToday Blog feed since June and I always get a thrill when I see updates. Jenny and I always stress that RSS is not just for content that updates everyday. It’s also useful for stuff that gets updated infrequently. I’m going to get new posts on the InfoToday blog whenever they post and not have to worry about missing anything.

I hope that you had a restful and thankful holiday. For those of you that read LS in your aggregator, you will notice that the feeds are no longer provided in full-text. There is an explanation, but unfortunately, I can’t write about it until the new year. Let’s just say that big things have been happening around here. Very big things. And these big things mean that I may/may not be providing a full-text RSS feed for my content. For now, I’m just doing some testing. Expect a full explanation in January.

Thank you again for your continued readership/commitment over the past 4 and a half years. Stick with me folks. We’re just getting started.