RSS and real life

Although I had heard about blogging and RSS feeds before I had never taken time to try them out for myself. While getting immersed in Bloglines and Goodle Reader last week I discover I just love it.

I especially liked the second part of the assignment where I created an RSS subscription list for my husband. When he looked through the blogs collected in the feed he found the announcement that his long term mentor and colleague with whom he hadn’t kept in contact very well had just died a day ago. It would have taken a long while till he would have found out this news through his traditional information channels. And although the death in itself was sad news, finding out early enough helped him to reconnect with previous friends and colleagues and this way be included in the grieving and support process.

Encouraged by this experience I have decided to work on RSS feeds as an addition to our library website. We include links to websites that seem useful in the various areas of studies that our institution offers. From what I discover now there are a host of blogs in the same study areas that contain much more current information and are kept quite updated. This would be a perfect supplement to the other free und useful electronic information. Maybe I should arrange the RSS feeds as a wiki so that students and faculty can get involved in adding their discoveries? Something to consider for the final project.