Proposal for RSS feeds at SNL Tech Library

Five Weeks to a Social Library:  Proposal for implementing social software tools in Sandia National Labs Technical Library 

During the Five Weeks course we explored wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, social software tools such as Flickr, Myspace and Second Life.

Inappropriate for our workplace are the photo sharing sites and Second Life.

The capabilities of wikis and blogs for collaborative projects are already available to us via the currently supported SharePoint sites, which we are already using.

Our library web page is within our staff’s control and could benefit from an overhaul that would

• allow users to more easily locate our products and services
• allow distribution of library news and marketing messages
• allow users to subscribe to “Alerts” on information of their choosing derived from our multiple electronic subscriptions
• provide a more modern look to the web page

The Technical Library should consider various ways to implement RSS feeds for library users.  Feeds could possibly be used to do all of the above renewal activities for our webpages.  Some feeds could contain library created content that markets our services and informs users of new products.  We could also provide information on outside feeds that would suit various users research needs.  We could create a webpage listing various feeds, which library users could then add to their individual intranet portlets. 

Here is example of such a website from a library similar to ours, Pacific Northwest National Lab.

http://libraryweb.pnl.gov/newsbridge/

One caution we will need to explore is that some external feeds may be subject to copyright.  Experts disagree about possible implications of copyright when subscribing to feeds for corporate intranets.  See  “RSS: Use, Lose or Abuse?”  in the Sept. 2006  eContent magazine.

http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=18140

I understand that the PNL portlet takes a good bit of staff time to maintain, therefore staffing issues would also need to be researched to provide a clear picture of the cost of such a project.