RSS for librarians

As has already been announced at Research Buzz and TVC Alert (yeah, I'm excited!), I have put up Bloglines for Librarians in Three (and a half) Easy Steps. This is a fast, easy way for librarians to set up RSS feeds in an aggregator--a way to read many blogs and other quickly-changing websites in one place, customized to their interests.

There's been a lot of stuff this week in the library blogosphere and on Web4Lib about RSS feeds, much of it summarized with links in this post at The Shifted Librarian. Although she missed my favorite tangent of the conversation, Dorothea's hacking rant at Caveat Lector.

Here's my tangential contribution. With all of these comments about how many of our patrons do or don't use RSS aggregators, nobody has ventured a guess on what percentage of librarians use RSS aggregators. I'm guessing it's no more than the Pew Report on The state of blogging came up with for the general population of internet users--about 5 percent.

I am not going to argue that every librarian should be using an aggregator. But I do think that every librarian with an interest in technology and the Internet and their near-term impact on libraries, should be using an aggregator. You will get more news on those fronts, more efficiently, from RSS feeds than anywhere else.

Most library students would fit in that subset of librarians with an interest in technology. Are we being taught about RSS aggregators? Nope. I'm in library school and I had to pick this stuff up on the street like everyone else.

So, last week, members of my study group asked me about RSS feeds.

Most articles and presentations for librarians about RSS feeds offer three or four choices of news aggregators and direct librarians to three or four lists with hundreds Library and Information Science feeds. In fact, that's exactly how I would organize such an article or presentation, given the opportunity.

But it seemed to me that all these choices were creating a barrier for librarians to get them going in an aggregator--which is actually an easy process. It might be better for many librarians to get started in anything and go back later, when they know how well the RSS aggregator is working for them, to revisit the choices.

So, for my study group, I set up a dummy account on Bloglines and came up with this handout to tell them how to use it to set up their own accounts of library-related feeds. I think it will take less than 15 minutes to get going. Given the interlinked and ever-changing nature of blogs and the web, they will be customizing their lists of feeds for their own interests for a long time to come.     #

June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007