Library Stuff

I actually stood up and clapped after reading this article by Christine Chrystie R. Hill, who is the community manager at WebJunction.

“The spirit of sharing more quickly and efficiently, across all kinds of boundaries, online, is reminding us that we can and should be doing better librarianship. All of this, and I don’t even get to detail the absolute thrill of learning, publishing, and discussing within a culture of shared responsibility, ownership, and collaboration.”

“You think you don’t have time for all these blogs, online discussions, RSS feeds, and web sites. But at the risk of sounding like a late-night infomercial, you can’t afford not to. We have two essential and critical problems in our profession. First, especially in public libraries, we are plagued by a scarcity model. We never have enough staff, time, resources, collections, or patrons…we never seem to have enough of anything. Second, we use the resources we do have to do work and solve problems that have already been done or solved. The good news is that in an online community we can take the skills we all have been trained in to help others and help ourselves.”

Go Christine Chrystie. Get busy. It’s your birthday.

A note to LJ publishers: Don’t think that I let the irony escape me that you are continuing to publish great articles on RSS, weblogs, and online communities and not put these methods into practice. I’m just thinking about the number of readers that you would gain (not to mention the increased revenue stream) if you:

1) Started an LJ weblog.
2) Had RSS Feeds for new articles and your news section.
3) Applied this knowledge to enhance and advance the profession.

2/23 – Post edited because I spelled the authors name wrong. Thanks Susan and sorry Chrystie.

While The Gates is sweeping the nation, I couldn’t help but notice the community interaction inherent in the weblog put together by Andy Carvin. He’s made it into an open weblog, inviting anybody to post via e-mail or phone (via audioblogger). How exciting!

One thing to take from this experience is that there can be some boundaries in open weblogging systems. For example, he’s asked readers to cc a separate e-mail address, so if there are any non-Gates stuff posted, it can be taken down. This is one of those efforts that really fires me up for big library conferences. The opportunities for open knowledge is endless at these events. There will be alot of blogging going on at Computers in Libraries this year and I will hopefully be experimenting with more audioblogging and working with others on some podcasting (I think). Maybe there should also be an “open” weblog for anyone to post pictures, blog their comments, record an audio post? I’d love to see how that would turn out. Anyone want to take the reigns on that wild horse and run with it?

I’ve mentioned Boogie Play in the past and didn’t really know what to think of it. Well, it looks like it’s undergone a huge redesign and is using Blogdigger as a backend. LS friend Greg Gershman (and the man behind Blogdigger) has the skinny:

“Besides the fact that this is a quick, easy and straight-forward way to view video content, I like the integration with Blogdigger. Rene is using our Media Search to allow users to search for videos by keyword, get back a list of matching videos, and watch them, all in a single page!”"

How thrilling. Rene has made a great move by working with Blogdigger.

Did anyone attend the Me? A Librarian? (You’ve Got to be Joking!) luncheon in Stamford, sponsored by the Black Caucus of the American Library Assocation – Connecticut chapter? The title intrigued me.

It’s not “officially” named Populicious, but the name fits. It works within Delicious and provides four sections:

1) New popular sites added within the last 24 hours.

2) New popular sites added within the last 48 hours.

3) Most popualar sites (new and old) within the last 24 hours.

4) Most popular sites of all time.

Each one has an RSS feed, although they didn’t work in Feed on Feeds. A very useful resource.

mefeedia “is an RSS aggregator for videobloggers. Sign up, choose the videobloggers you like and watch videos! Mefeedia is an experimental videoblogging community side project by Peter Van Dijck.”

Oooh. Neat. Plus tags with customized feeds built in. (link via del.icio.us)

Doug Mason from The Buena Park Library District writes in:

“I just wanted to alert you to some changes I have made to our library’s website in order to incorporate blogging and RSS. I know this is a rudimentary use of the technology (particularly since I am not yet an adequate programmer) due to my use of third-party services, but so far this has been working great for both me (my workload!) and for the public (they get their updates on our new happenings far faster now).

The stats on our website are increasing quickly, and I have only had this setup going for about 5 weeks. I just added the tips for subscribing to Bloglines on the homepage. The updates above those tips (which are above the XML icon) are actually feeds from my feedburner service that link to the blog. Comments are currently turned off for obvious reasons until I can find a work-around (crazed naughty comments must be weeded out first!). I did include the “send email” function that Blogger has for facilitating the user in communicating events to friends or other interested parties.”

Doug attended an RSS presentation that Jenny and I did at Internet Librarian in November. Doug gets it and is proof that you don’t have to know much about programming to get news out to your users via weblogs and RSS technology.

Doug’s library has a weblog, uses an Feedburner feed, and has an introduction to RSS, which is essential to new users. I just love seeing that orange button on the front of library web sites. Thanks Doug.

I totally forgot to mention Infoshare (which I promised to pimp last week – Sorry John).

Infoshare is the weblog of the Information Sharing Subcommittee of the Reference and Public Services Committee of the Music Library Association. They are blogging the MLA conference this week and have over 10 contributors. Suweeet! Looking at the first post, it looks like the MLA people have gone blog happy. The Atlantic Chapter has started a blog this week, calling it a “Newsletter/Blog”.

Hip Hip Hooray. Geoff Harder posts the huge news! There are now 285 feeds. Check this out:

Their new books section is broken into specific libraries and subjects. I clicked on Social Sciences and there is a feed for every Cutter code. Wowza!! I have always wanted to see something like this in action. I’m assuming that these feeds are automatically created with the cataloging system.

Props to the University of Alberta libraries for having the guts to put so many little orange buttons all over the place. Plus, there is an RSS tutorial. Into the RSS presentations it goes.

Update – Kenton Good writes up how they pulled it off. Thanks for putting it out there Kenton, for the good of the profession and the future of RSS in libraries.

Will Richardson links to a primer [PDF] on everything that you’ve ever wanted to know about Furl, but were afraid to ask. It was written by Jim Wenzloff. Impressive. File….Print.