RSS Feeds and Social Bookmarking
Submitted by cheriduncan on Sun, 2007-02-25 16:23.
After reading the material this week and viewing the presentations, I can certainly see where RSS feeds can be useful tools for libraries. I think that, for my library, pushing information about our resouces and notifying our faculty members of newly acquired resources are two key uses of RSS feeds. Despite our best efforts, we struggle with the issue of faculty members not being aware of or not remembering the newest resources. It seems to take an average of about two years for new resources to catch on, but perhaps that's because the faculty need to become familiar with them before they encourage the students to use them. Another topic on RSS feeds concerns the TOC alerts which many journal issue regularly. I recently heard of a library that took the time to sign up faculty members, who wanted to stay informed, but didn't have the time or the know how, for these alerts. Since many of these alerts are also offered as RSS feeds, this would be a great way of introducing our faculty to RSS technology, as well.
As far as social bookmarking, I'm still struggling with this one. I see the potential, but think that it might be a hard sell to our subject specialists. I think I'll find a couple of willing subject librarians and work on a pilot project this summer for this one, when the participants would have more time to focus on such a project.
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I can completely relate to
I can completely relate to your last paragraph. When I first started at my job a year and a half ago, my new co-workers set me up with a Furl account and raved and raved and raved about it. I did precisely nothing with it. After a year, I'd only bookmarked 40 or 50 sites, and most of those were because I felt a little obligated to try this thing that everybody else thought was so important and useful. (The same week they introduced me to Furl, they also mentioned RSS, but it took me until last spring before I "got it." Then all of a sudden this novelty thing that I couldn't see the benefit of became one of the primary tools of my trade, and the switch happened almost over night!)
But then about 6 or 8 months ago, I saw a few rich examples of the ways that other subject specialists were using their bookmarks, and those examples clicked with me. Now I have literally hundreds of bookmarks, tagged by the disciplines I serve (I'm the librarian for languages, literatures, and the arts) in my del.icio.us account, and I've started feeding these bookmarks all over the place.
Two other good examples of subject-specific collections are my co-worker Heather's furl account (she's the librarian for History, Religion, Philosophy, and some area studies), and my co-worker Kristin's data blog. Kristin is the librarian for the social sciences, and does a lot to help students get their hands on data sets. She uses this blog almost exactly as I use del.icio.us and Heather uses Furl.
There are probably lots of other subject specialists out there who are doing similar work, but I know of these two first hand, and they're the ones who inspired me, so maybe they'll be useful to you.
P.S. Kristin (the social
P.S. Kristin (the social sciences librarian) also has a rich furl account.
Arg. Wrong URL. Kristin's
Arg. Wrong URL. Kristin's furl is here. Sorry about that.