The History Librarian raises an interesting question in his brief post, “Using RSS Feeds: Librarians vs. Historians.” History Librarian notes that of the Project Muse feeds he monitors, the library-themed ones have many more (15, 23, and 43) subscribers than the history-related ones (6, 1, 4, and 4). Are librarians far ahead of the researchers we support in terms of RSS adoption — and is this a good or a bad thing?
I would say it’s good or bad depending on the efforts we make to educate our clientele on the benefits of the tool. To the extent that we (we librarians, I mean) inform our customers of ways they can do their research and current awareness-building more effectively, it’s a good thing. If, however, we’re merely talking and reading amongst ourselves… Well, this may not be a bad thing, but it probably isn’t a good thing, either.
Then again, I’d wager that most libraries public catalogs show similar usage patterns to ours: the advanced search page is rarely used, but most of that infrequent use is by librarians… Which is not to say the catalog is a failure or pointless, just that it works well enough for the average user.
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