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iLike the iSchool

Apr 8, ’08 7:49 AM

Last Friday I had the honor of giving the first talk in the newly resurrected Margaret Chisholm Lecture series. Over 100 LIS students, alumni, and faculty spent a portion of their evening talking about the read/write web with me. LIS on a Friday night? My kinda folks for sure. I even got to meet my Flickr friend Jen Waller face to face. Nice!

They made some great posters for the event:

And had a big screen:

Here’s a pdf of my slides for the event: Libraries and the Read/Write Web. [11 MB]

Someone asked about what I read to keep up with all of the cool things happening on the web and in libraries. I managed to recommend using a feed reader and name a few blogs. I didn’t give a very exhaustive list mostly because my incoming self selected information stream is such a blur. I probably couldn’t name a quarter of the weblogs I subscribe to, I just pick out the interesting bits when they pop up.

To make up for my weak answer I promised to list some blogs that could make a little starter kit for keeping track of what’s happening with libraries and the read/write web. You’ll notice it is mostly non-library blogs. I’m not slighting library blogs, just highlighting the point that we need to get outside of the library and related writing.

Tech stuff
Gizmodo
NYT Technology

Design
Signal vs. Noise
information aesthetics
swissmiss

General
kottke.org
Lifehacker
TechCrunch

Misc
Pasta&Vinegar
Pink Tentacle
Wired Top Stories

Libraries
Librarian.net
LibraryCrunch
LibraryBytes
The Shifted Librarian
Swiss Army Librarian

Two more points. First, don’t click around to all of these sites every day. Use a feed reader to bring the information to you. To learn about that, see RSS in Plain English. Also, don’t limit yourself to these blogs and their feeds. Find some blogs relevant to you and your hobbies. This will get you in the habit of checking your reader frequently.

Thanks to everyone that made it a great event.

Comments (10)

i <3 making webpages

Nov 29, ’07 7:59 PM

Sometimes I get infatuated with certain webpages I’ve thrown together so I’m going to post about this one. I knew when I saw the WordPress theme Fluid Blue on The Liminal Librarian that I absolutely had to use it for the NPPL site. It is widget friendly and I like the way it looks.

With a bit more time to concentrate on the digitalness of the library I changed our main Books & Movies page to what you see below. Here you see RSS feeds coming from our catalog displayed through Feed2JS. I still think Feed2JS action is really cool even though it doesn’t feel particularly cutting edge to me any more.

Unfortunately, there’s no RSS feed available for just new items from the NPPL. The list is for the entire cooperative. Boo. Ideally I’d like a list just for our items and the ability to make some customizations of that too. If I could have a feed of just our YS items, I bet I could get the local elementary school to display it somewhere on their site.

In a gChat the other day Michael K. Pate mentioned to me that this feature doesn’t exist because, in part, Polaris hasn’t heard a demand for it from the Polaris Users Group. I guess I can’t doubt that. Maybe in the next release, as we say.

Even though the list isn’t ideal, I still like the page. Why? Because it is saves us time. You know what I got to do tonight instead of trying to stay on top on manually listing new materials on the library website? Meet new library users, chat with them, and shake some hands.

Comments (5)

i

Nov 29, ’07 7:59 PM

Sometimes I get infatuated with certain webpages I’ve thrown together so I’m going to post about this one. I knew when I saw the WordPress theme Fluid Blue on The Liminal Librarian that I absolutely had to use it for the NPPL site. It is widget friendly and I like the way it looks.

With a bit more time to concentrate on the digitalness of the library I changed our main Books & Movies page to what you see below. Here you see RSS feeds coming from our catalog displayed through Feed2JS. I still think Feed2JS action is really cool even though it doesn’t feel particularly cutting edge to me any more.

Unfortunately, there’s no RSS feed available for just new items from the NPPL. The list is for the entire cooperative. Boo. Ideally I’d like a list just for our items and the ability to make some customizations of that too. If I could have a feed of just our YS items, I bet I could get the local elementary school to display it somewhere on their site.

In a gChat the other day Michael K. Pate mentioned to me that this feature doesn’t exist because, in part, Polaris hasn’t heard a demand for it from the Polaris Users Group. I guess I can’t doubt that. Maybe in the next release, as we say.

Even though the list isn’t ideal, I still like the page. Why? Because it is saves us time. You know what I got to do tonight instead of trying to stay on top on manually listing new materials on the library website? Meet new library users, chat with them, and shake some hands.

Comments (5)

multnomah county OPAC gets RSS

Mar 16, ’07 9:57 AM

Imagine my surprise earlier this week when I went to the Multnomah County Library Catalog and found a big, bright orange RSS icon.

MCL RSS

They’ve rolled out III’s RSS product, and have 15 feeds coming out of the catalog:

  • Audiobooks,
  • Children’s fiction
  • Cookbooks
  • DVDs
  • Fiction
  • Gardening books
  • Graphic novels
  • Music
  • Mysteries
  • Non fiction
  • Science fiction
  • Teen fiction
  • Teen graphic novels
  • Travel books
  • Picture books/ easy readers

I subscribed to a half-dozen feeds in Bloglines to see how many subscribers are listed (not that this figure is the be all, end all) and found that DVDs is the most popular feed with 34 subscribers. Other feeds have 4-10 subscribers.

I like that they are promoting their RSS feeds in a prominent place. I also like the nice What is RSS? page they’ve put together.

Gripes? Ideally patrons would be able to create their own feeds for specific searches (like aadl.org) but, to my knowledge, this isn’t a feature available from III. I’m guessing that most “2.0″ solutions coming from vendors will be watered down like this. I’d be more than willing to eat my words though!

Having the feeds available is a great first step, and I hope to see MCL take further action integrating the library into the community by helping other organizations get feeds displayed on their websites.

Comments (4)

Car Talk RSS Feeds

Jan 14, ’06 10:45 AM

After a nice Saturday morning of coffee and reading No Country for Old Men I turned on NPR and made some waffles. As we finished, so did Car Talk. They endedthe show with a “Subscribe to our RSS feeds” announcement and a nice explanation of how it works.

Hearing more and more about RSS from various places always seems a bit profound. Observing more outlets offering RSS and more people using it are little moments of, “Yeah, I guess it is all happening.” We’re not even close to seeing the early majority adopt the technology, but it is getting easier to see how it will happen.

If you like Car Talk, here are their feeds:
Car Talk Puzzler feed
Dear Tom and Ray – Cartalk Newspaper Column feed

Comments (2)

reference librarian start page

Jan 9, ’06 11:59 AM

Last month Tim Lauer at his site Education/Technology posted an interesting bit titled Inward / Outward Aggregating about personalized homepages (e.g. netvibes, google ig). In his post he takes the concept of the personal start page, collecting hand selected data from disparate sources (generally via RSS feeds) and displaying them in a useful format, and thinks of it as applied to being a school’s principal. He’d like to see “…content such as my school’s average daily attendance; a daily listing of absent and tardy students; GPS routing information for our school busses…” when he opens his browser. This resonated with me, and I’m interested to hear what pieces of information Reference, Readers’ Advisory and Circulation staff would like to see on their homepage. My job would be facilitated if I could see:

  • the day, week, and month’s most requested book, locally and system wide
  • the meeting room schedule for the day and week
  • important news from the library, community and the world
  • reference queries that have come in via email

Library web folk could benefit from a start page to monitor their web presence, bringing in:

  • web stats, highlighting pages that are popular
  • pages that have bad links
  • conversations going on about the library (blog searches, flickr comments, del.icio.us tags)

These things aren’t entirely impossible to aggregate. The most unrealistic thing for me, the ILS stuff, would be really simple if there was vendor support for XML.

Comments (2)

immedi.at

Nov 23, ’05 4:18 PM

I don’t do much quick linking here, but if no one else is going to post about this, I will. Why? Because it combines two great things: IM and RSS.

This service let’s you subscribe to RSS feeds via an IM account. It works though a bookmarket named “monitor this” which you can click on a page that has a feed. Then you simply select a service and screen name.

So I can tell immedi.at to send updates from a blog to a screen name, and when the feed is updated, it pings the screen name. Neat. When I tried this out, there was no validation, so this service is high on the prankability scale.

I’m not sure how immedi.at it really is. I my test subscription took about 1 minute. Also, you might get a “Application error Rails application failed to start properly” message since people are likely hammering their server right now.

I couldn’t see having all of my subscriptions coming in though IM, but perhaps it would be good for following some feeds closely for a set period of time. Play and enjoy! And remember, Tom the Turkey is your friend!

Comments (3)

that was quick

Oct 24, ’05 2:26 PM

The 5th generation iPod, the one that plays video, was released only a few days back. However, there is already a decent amount of (pre-converted to the appropriate file type) content available via BitTorrent. It won’t be long before I can get the Daily Show not only downloaded automatically to my desktop, but sent straight into a video iPod. This is one step closer to the failure of content providers’ current business model failing.

If you’re wondering how, azureus is a BitTorrent client that supports RSS Feed Scanner which reads RSS feeds from torrent trackers such as torrent spy

Comments (6)

money -> mouth

Mar 29, ’05 11:51 AM

In the post leading communities through info technologies I mentioned that I’d report back on the results of some advanced type classes at the library. Last week I held a class titled “Weblogs and Really Simple Sundication (RSS)” at the library.

Only 4 people attended. This, however, was a good size. Noone was familiar with blogs or rss.

money -> mouth

Mar 29, ’05 11:51 AM

In the post leading communities through info technologies I mentioned that I’d report back on the results of some advanced type classes at the library. Last week I held a class titled “Weblogs and Really Simple Sundication (RSS)” at the library.

Only 4 people attended. This, however, was a good size. Noone was familiar with blogs or rss.

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