I want to share! October 4, 2006

Great, having built a library intranet at my last co-op, I can appreciate how easily Feed2JS & RSS2HTML would add dynamic content to any webpage – you get fresh content on your website with no further effort required! I played around with them and previewed the results, but I’m pretty sure WordPress doesn’t allow you to insert this code (please correct me if I am wrong), to add a RSS feed you simply go to your ‘Sidebar Widgets’ editing page, drag and drop a ‘RSS 1′ box, hit the ‘configure box’ in the right hand corner of your new ‘RSS’ 1 widget, insert the link, title and choose the number of items to display. Simple!

The OPML generator appeared to work for me… I made an OPML of 5 different library job sites, three of which I created using FeedYes, so be warned they may not display perfectly. I included ‘The most recent Information Management and Librarianship jobs from www.jobs.ac.uk‘, OLA’s Graduate jobs, USA Combined Library Job Postings, U of T’s FIS jobs, and UWO’s LIS Canadian jobs.  If you have any ideas of sites I should add, please send them my way and I’ll fix up my OPML!

This week’s case studies are all great examples of the feeds McKiernan was calling for in 2004, TOC’s of current journal articles from publishers, or in this case, database providers. I thought ProQuest’sDissertations & Theses RSS feed, a service that notifies you each time a theses or dissertation in a select subject area is added to their database, is so necessary in the academic environment. I’m actually really hoping for the chance to share this service with someone who may need it!

Week 5: Reading more on RSS October 4, 2006

Although it seems a few of these library RSS feeds have since died, I still appreciated Gerry McKiernan 2004 article’s compilation of library RSS links. The Ohio University ‘Business Blog’ especially intrigued me because it is done in WordPress and has a great survey up on the Sept 25, 2006 post. I suppose this is a privately hosted WordPress version?
I am glad of the Weblogs and RSS in information work article for this statement: “Libraries should be guiding users to appropriate weblogs, as they do for websites or discussion lists, though identifying those of value is more difficult since the proportion of ‘serious’ ones is lower.” And for demonstrating that another difficulty is keeping the links up-to-date, since a few on this article aren’t functioning – nor are some links on the pages linked to by this article functioning, like Library Weblogs featuring a dead link to our prof Amanda’s former blog, Bibliolatry. Too bad I can’t snoop any further! But returning to the point, I think it would be valuable for librarians to recommend blogs on particular subjects, just like the author of one of the blogs I ‘reviewed’ for this week’s paper has done with law library blogs on her site Novalawcity.

From the article Success Story: RSS Moves into the Mainstream at the University of Alberta Libraries, we learn how the feeds at U of A work: “The RSS feeds for New Books by Subject include second level LC classifications, allowing the user to subscribe to the feeds for TJ – Mechanical Engineering, and Machinery and TP – Chemical Technology, for example. A subscription to the relevant RSS feeds ensures that users will not miss any new books announcements, such as when they are away at a meeting or on vacation.” I had assumed for some silly reason that the feeds were linked to keyword searches so I’m glad I have been corrected. I am very excited about the obvious great uses of this service! At my co-op jobs I distributed table of contents services and CCOD’s, both of which took a lot of effort and felt quite robotic – RSS could help librarians get around these nasty mechanical duties & make libraries into impressive hubs of efficiency.

In regards to the Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable article, I’ve enjoyed getting my classmates del.icio.us tags in Bloglines for the past month. But can anyone tell me why you would want to use the service Philip mentions in his last paragraph, Pasta?

The ‘wow’ factor September 28, 2006

Great work, libraries, with your RSS feeds! While Tacoma PL and U of Oklahoma’s uses of RSS were the most conventional, they were very impressive in their categorization. Signing up for a feed of my library’s new books in a personal or scholarly interest is very appealing to me.

Hennepin County Library offers ’subject guide’ feeds which appear to be a librarian’s suggestions relevant to a pre-existing subject guide, posted approximately monthly (at least this is the case for the Ready Reference feed that I added to my Bloglines). This is a unique idea, and I love unique ideas, but as a patron I think I would prefer RSS feeds on new acquisitions that interest me.

All (except NHMCCD) offer ‘current library events’ type feeds, which is really a great, essentially free, marketing tool.

I was intrigued by Western Kentucky U Library’s obscurely titled feeds New Stuff and Old Stuff. I thought it was brave of them to use these titles, and that the curiosity factor worked for me!

It’s great to see a whole collection of journal article RSS feeds altogether at NHMCCD. But there is no ‘wow’ factor on this page, I feel it is missing something. At a minimum, more spacing. But back to the RSS – this would save the library a lot of resources if they could set this up rather than the old-fashioned Table of Contents Service, and the use of technology is where the patron would see the ‘wow’ factor.

The Kansas City Public Library’s RSS feeds page has a high ‘wow’ factor. First of all the graphic is great, and offering ‘most popular guides’ is very helpful since they have 47 feeds! The feeds themselves are a mashup of librarian tips, library events, and borrowed feeds from Yahoo. I’m a big fan of this combination idea – but aren’t they missing new acquisitions? Correct me if I’m wrong…

Choices, choices September 25, 2006

So Amanda is making us check out other rss aggregators this week and I have to say I am both intrigued and put out by this. My first impression of Rojo is that it looks slightly more modern than Bloglines. I like how you can edit your subscriptions in the left navigation bar by clicking on the little icon – it is much faster than Bloglines which really lets you feel like you are waiting for a page to load. But why did it sign me up for all the feeds when I clearly left some unselected? Wow, my account is huge. I’ll give it a go for a few more days…

Netvibes hasn’t impressed me much since I’m used to all the same features in Google Homepage. But it is great how the add content feature opens on the left side of the page since in Google it navigates you away to a new page where you select your content. And I wonder how long they’ve had the ‘New tab’ feature since Google only just started doing this a few days ago.

I want more RSS! September 25, 2006

I am one of the lucky four who collaborated on this week’s group presentation on RSS. Please leave us some comments!

At school today I was chatting (in person!) with Shauna-Lee, our Menno Girl. We were discussing the job search (gulp!) and how great it would be to get one RSS feed with all the Canadian library jobs. It would be even better to get them in categories, such as Academic vs. Public or BC vs. Ontario. It’s a shame that neither CLA nor OLA offer RSS feeds for their job postings. This UK job site offers RSS feeds for Information Management and Librarianship, and what a great thing!

I’ve been subscribing to RSS through Bloglines since the beginning of the summer and am definitely a fan. I can scan through the headlines pretty quick now and ferret out articles of interest to me. *BUT* it has turned into a time-waster rather than a time-saver for me because I am constantly looking for new feeds to try out & therefore have way too many new articles daily to ever get through. My Bloglines account currently has 72 feeds, and it is only this low because I have been working hard lately at deleting the ones that don’t capture my interest at least on a weekly basis. Are there any other feed junkies out there? What is your culling policy?

This week I got a great article out of one of my Bloglines feeds – it’s called How to explain RSS the Oprah Way, and in it the author (Back in Skinny Jeans) calls RSS “I’m Ready for Some Stories”. How cute. So if you don’t get RSS yet, check out this article and you really can’t not get it. Or, maybe send it to your mother/father. But if you want to stay away from the cute, I really liked this article from IBM when I was working on an RSS project for my co-op employer. It demonstrates how some RSS providers are providing aggregator-specific icons on their webpages that will plunk the RSS feed directly into your reader (Bloglines, My Yahoo! or Pluck, in the case of IBM) at the click of the button.

Another random thought on RSS: in our group presentation we mention that RSS feeds can come to your email and I posted a cheeky little comment “(but who wants more email?)”. I stand by that comment. In one of this weeks’ readings you’ll see that “5) RSS can be fully integrated fully in your email. Yes, no one forbids the final user from using new services and tools which do allow perfect integration and receipt of RSS feeds inside your email Inbox.” I’m glad this author is on my side – are you?