RSS, Libraries, and Yet Another Librarian Blogger Survey
February 26th, 2006Is it me or are library blogger surveys all the rage these days? I don’t have an issues with them at all (I think they are very useful in understanding how libraries, librarians, and blogs fit in together), but they are certainly popular. The latest one is from CW.
Also, I think RSS is taking a back seat to all of these new tools that we have been talking about. RSS is, IMO, what drives blogs, and other pieces of social software (Flickr is just a place to store and post pictures without RSS updates - RSS is the engine that pushes the sharing). Why don’t we talk about RSS more? Or are we and I’m missing it? I’m probably as guilty as the next blogger in getting caught up in the hype and not looking at the roots of social software services.
I was thrilled to see this post by Mark Bernstein:
“But librarians need news as much as anyone else — particularly news about the world of writing. What books do we need to know about? What books do our patrons need to know about? RSS is a superb channel — provided you can create a good reading list.”
Mark also links to a presentation summary by Alisa Parker on RSS in New Zealand libraries:
“Libraries can collate such feeds into a reference list for users to subscribe to, or incorporate the information from the feeds directly into web pages. Libraries also generate their own feeds and provide users with announcements about things as library hours or new resources. How, then, in 2006 are New Zealand libraries using RSS?”