RSS: Value Added
Submitted by rachelkingcade on Wed, 2007-02-21 00:26.
About a year ago, I never read blogs and did not know what RSS was. Thanks to a fellow colleague (Halle :), I started nosing around library blogs and quite accidentally discovered RSS. There was mention of it during my MLIS course at USC, but it was hazy and not anything I'd focus on at that time. Later, at work as a reference librarian, I love a good mystery, so I started exploring this strange new world. Within a week, I was hooked. The value of blogs became clear when I discovered the information just waiting to be used, but the RSS brought it right to my doorstep, thus alleviating my constant search of websites to catch up on professional material. Talking with my manager, we decided to put an aggregator (Bloglines) on the Ref Desk computer so we could share feeds via a Ref Desk account when we had time to catch up. So, what at first seemed on the fringe and potentially yet one more "other duty as assigned" became fun and easily used. Now, my goal is to use RSS for our library system to promote all kinds of events, blogs you name it. Just another way of politely getting in our user's face and saying "Hey! We are here for you and you don't need to do a thing."
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Rachel, I'm fascinated by
Rachel, I'm fascinated by the general refuser account. How do you deal with who's seen what? When I view something in Bloglines, it's no longer new and disappears. Is it just a setting that I miss?
Do you find that you get into conversations with other ref people about what you've read? It seems a lot more efficient than the classic eternally shuffling magazine routing lists ("Oh, look, the Library Journal from last June! In my inbox today!").
Hi Alisia, Thanks for the
Hi Alisia,
Thanks for the good question. We started out with the understanding that it was designed for us to use to help our patrons, but we made sure that when we tagged things, that if it needed to be private we kept it accordingly. So, we are cognizant of the fact that 99% of what we tag is for public viewing and that is great because we love to share sources to begin with. Private tags are for things which we have subscriptions to, but the rest we build as a user tool to share with our patrons. Our handle is bclrefdesk, for the Beaufort Branch and our other branches are doing it too.
As for Bloglines, when you want to view older material you just click on your feed and refresh what you want to see by hour, week or longer. That helps!
We do get into lots of conversations about what we read and this helps us keep up sometimes better than the print materials. In fact, I generally have read the latest on blogs and other feeds before I get the magazines :) It is WAY better :)
Rachel S. Kingcade
Yay! I'm so proud to be
Yay! I'm so proud to be (partly) responsible for your blog-reading. :) Have you tried the Google Reader? I've converted to that from Bloglines.
Glad u saw that Halle! I
Glad u saw that Halle! I have played around with Google reader...but I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. What are your thoughts? Was it any easy transition? Better to use since u also use Gmail? Ooooh tell me!
Rachel S. Kingcade