Library Stuff

Unmediated points to a special section of the latest issue of Communications of the ACM about weblogs. Neat. Here are the titles and authors. You need to be a member to obtain the articles, but maybe your library subscribes to the journal and you can get them there. I’ll bet they aren’t on Google Scholar.

+ Introduction, Andrew Rosenbloom

+ Structure and evolution of blogspace, Ravi Kumar, Jasmine Novak, Prabhakar Raghavan, Andrew Tomkins

+ Why we blog, Bonnie A. Nardi, Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht, Luke Swartz

+ Semantic blogging and decentralized knowledge management, Steve Cayzer

+ How blogging software reshapes the online community, Rebecca Blood

+ Democracy and filtering, Cass R. Sunstein

From the site:

“Would you like to create RSS feeds without ANY programming at all? FeedFire will take virtually any web site and convert it into a RSS feed, suitable for use in web pages or RSS news readers.”

“FeedFire is a sophisticated solution that is simple to use, yet powerful, completely automated and customisable. No feed available from the page you would like to syndicate? Easily turn that page into a RSS feed, with no programming knowledge or experience needed.”

Many librarians came up to me at Internet Librarian asking if feeds can be created without creating a weblog. I said, yeah, but it would be difficult (for us non-techie folk, that is). Feedfire may be a viable amswer to that question.

Who would have thunk it? When I think about RSS, the furthest thing from my mind is PDF. It looks like 7.0 will have a built-in aggregator that will convert RSS Feeds in PDF. Very odd, but interesting. Why would I want to convert RSS Feeds into PDF? Anyone?

From Planet PDF: “The ‘Track News’ functionality in Acrobat 6.0 has been separated out into the Tracker tool. The main addition to it is that you can also use the Tracker to subscribe to news feeds. If you’re not familiar with these, numerous sites these days offer syndicated ‘feeds’ that let you download a summary of each item into your ‘reader’ software; it’s just a matter of copying the link to the RSS, XML or RDF format service from a site and copying it into your news reader. The one in Tracker allows you to build summaries of all the items in PDF and lets you convert any of the items (usually Web pages) to PDF — handy if you want to archive them or print a copy for offline viewing.”

(link via LawLibTech)

Congrats to Aaron on his mention in Library Journal. Aaron is one of a kind and a true hero in our profession. Way to go!

Bob Wyman (of PubSub) writes:

“Ideally, users would have both retrospective and prospective search built into a single user interface — instead of having to use two different tools each of which only addresses half the user’s needs. Thus, at PubSub.com, we’ve been looking for retrospective search partners that we can team up with to provide a unified search experience. If we can find someone to work with, or if we end up building retrospective search ourselves, then you’ll be able to first do a retrospective search and when you’ve found results that you’re interested in, you could then click a button that would say something like: ‘Keep searching!’ or ‘Tell me whenever…’ Similarly, if you had started with a new prospective search, you could click a button to retrieve the history of items that would have been delivered had you created your search subscription earlier.”

PubSub is a prospective search tool, since they don’t store any data. No need to keep the past if you are only searching in the future, Bob would say. I don’t think that I agree, however, that Feedster is a retrospective-only engine. One can also “search the future” with Feedster. Run a search, then grab the feed and you will be notified of any new content prospectively. Just because it has a database doesn’t mean that it can’t be prospective.

Google is definitely a retrospective-only search engine. It searches “older” content and doesn’t provide a way for us to monitor what new stuff comes into their database. Their loss.

Here’s an idea. Since PubSub aims to be prospective, how about teaming up with large library book databases (OCLC or RLG) or fee-based databases like Proquest and have prospective monitoring devices set up for any future keyword criteria in certain databases. Or, if a business profile has been updated in the many business databases, let me know with a feed. Or, work with individual libraries to have new titles of books in certain subjects (or via DDC) delivered into my aggregator. Not only would that be prospective, but it would be “Innovative”.