Library Stuff

Carol Cooke attended a pre-conference worekshop on RSS and Weblogs that Jenny and I did at Internet Librarian in November and is still writing about her experiences there. She blogs:

“Think about your average day, one of the most important things you can to to remain relevant to your institution is to read. Journals, newsletters, books, newspapers etc. I receive tables of contents via e-mail, in paper, have people recommend articles and leave them on my desk. Theoretically this reading is supposed to help you learn and grow professionally but much to my shame I never seem to find the time to read. When I do get around to cleaning my desktop and e-mail box my first instinct is to recycle and move on (promising all the time to do better).”

“RSS has changed this for me. I am using RSS to setup a personal “newspaper” that is filled with content that is of interest to me. Now I take 15-30 minutes of my day and skim my paper and read what interests me.”

And that, my friends, is the reason why I do what I do. To get librarians excited about this stuff. I’m sure Jenny would agree with me.

Steven Johnson has a well-blogged-about essay in the NYT Book Review entitled Tool for Thought. In it he talks about a tool he uses to store all his research articles, notes to himself, and more.

“Having all this information available at my fingerprints does more than help me find my notes faster. Yes, when I’m trying to track down an article I wrote many years ago, it’s now much easier to retrieve. But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents I’ve forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn’t know I was looking for.”

That’s exactly what I use Furl for. For example, I’m starting to do research for upcoming books and presentations and remembered that I once came across a book about social capital that I had wanted to read. I did remember that I had Furl’d it and probably wouldn’t have remembered it otherwise. Yet another reason why I love web-based open-bookmark tagging tools. They help us in more ways than one. Tag, you’re it!

One of my editors (Thanks RVM) sent me this e-mail on Friday morning:

“There’s an article in the latest Library Resources and Technical Services…that you might be interested in, entitled, “TalkLeft, Boing Boing, and Scrappleface: The Phenomenon of Weblogs and their Impact on Library Technical Services” by Paul Moeller and Nathan Rupp.”

I’m interested! I’m interested! Rats, not on my county library database yet…

The Delicious tag stemmer by Matt Biddulph seems useful. It helps in cleaning up your tags that you have created with the same tag stems (ie blog/blogs). Take a look at this example.

I found this from a feed to http://del.icio.us/tag/del.icio.us that I subscribe to. A good number of posts that I make here have been found via del.icio.us, Furl, and other open-tagging systems. More proof that they work for capturing new content in areas of interest.

Reminder: If you find a useful resource from del.icio.us or Furl, make sure to cite it. For the good of the community.

One of my Furl feeds linked me to Hyperlinkage, a new web-based aggregator. I signed up (of course I did) and played with it for a while and was impressed with the system. Registration was easy (even though they send an e-mail confirmation, I didn’t immediately have to go there and get it – It logged me in automatically after registration – Neat), and adding feeds was a snap. You have the option of adding your feeds to a community directory (another form of collective intelligence at work in the aggregator business?) or making it private. There is a “Bloglines” quality to it in that your feeds appear on the left and the content comes up on the right. The updated feeds are also bolded so that you don’t have to click around.

A few issues:

1) Can’t delete feeds.
2) No full-text feeds (even if the party provides it).
3) No way to keep up with upgrades (No blog, no feed – ugh).
4) No OPML inport/export.

One to watch. I’m sure that they are working on it.