Librarians vs. Researchers

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.

Reader’s Club: Librarians’ Book Reviews with RSS

Looking for a source of book reviews to put on your library site? Or perhaps just looking for a review of a recently published book? A source I just stumbled on, Reader’s Club, has just that: more than 2000 book reviews written by librarians and library staff at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina since 1998.
Reviews are categorized by genre. And, the reason this is germane here — every genre has an RSS feed. That’s more than 50 genre-based feeds available through the RSS Feeds Directory. Feeds are limited to books added in the past 45 days, but the complete list of reviews is searchable via the web site.
Whether this is a project to emulate within your own library, or great source of reviews to aid in collection development or to provide patrons, this is a great idea.

[Via The Relevant Library.]

ZapTXT — RSS to You

ZapTXT (a beta product — but aren’t they all?) is a new service that lets you set up a keyword search of specific RSS feeds and send you an alert — by email, instant messenger, or text message to a mobile device — when those keywords appear in that feed. ZapTXT provides a list of popular news feeds (for example, Technology contains about 20 pre-selected feeds, including Engadget, Pogue’s Posts, Resource Shelf, and more; Political Blogs contains Wonkette, Daily Kos, and a bunch of others). You can pick multiple sites using the preselected lists. Alternately, you can specify your own favorite feed source. To add multiple personally selected sources, first create the feed, then edit it to add additional RSS sources.
Email alerts go to any email address. IM alerts only go to Jabber, Gtalk and MSN clients — leaving out AOL’s instant messenger. Test messaging is available for all major cell service providers.
With a carefully constructed set of keywords, this is another great clipping service substitute.
Addendum: Sameer Patel of ZapTXT sent me the following helpful tip — a simple way to search the ENTIRE blogosphere for a keyword. In his words:

Go to Sphere.com.
Enter any search term
Throw the RSS feed for the Sphere results page into ZapTXT as a ZapTask.
You are now monitoring a search term across the entire blogsphere. And if you select “as they appear” when you’re setting up your ZapTask, that’s exactly what happens. With this method, you’re monitoring the entire post of all blogs that Sphere catches. So if ZapTXT showed up deep in the body of the post, the RSS feed from Sphere catches that as part of the result and you get a ZapTXT alert.
[Via LISNews.]

Clipping Service on the Cheap

This may be of benefit to, primarily, special librarians, but it’s worth a thought for any librarian wishing to make a positive impression on whatever group or person is responsible for funding… David Rothman, in his blog focusing on medical librarianship, notes how easy it is to provide a quality current awareness service to one’s organization. A simple search at a news aggregator (that is, an aggregator that actually handles just “official” news sources, not the broader blogosphere) can populate a web page with recent headlines and links to the full-text articles.
Rothman recommends FeedGit, which aggregates these “official” news sources. Enter a search term. You’ll see a list of news providers grouped by type (news, web, blogs, images, etc.). For each content type, there are links to an RSS feed specifically on your search term at each of the providers.
Putting this feed on a web page is the next step that Rothman notes — don’t even bother the decision makers with the raw RSS (unless, of course, they’ve already joined that bandwagon). User your favorite RSS-to-HTML script (mine is Feed2JS), tailor the style to match your own site, and tell the world (or the individual) that it’s there. Voilà! A quick-and-dirty clipping service.

[Thanks to The Krafty Librarian.]

Mapping the Blogosphere

We all know about the interconnectedness of the blogosphere. We also know about the “chimneys” of information flows that many RSS users find themselves in (I discussed this in an earlier post about serendipity). But what do these interconnections actually look like?

A recent article, Human Trails in Cyberspace in The Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription required] describes attempts to map these interconnections. At first glance, a map of the interconnections between blogs [See slide 3 in particular; images are from Chronicle.com, subscription required] looks something like an Independence Day fireworks show. According to the article, though,

Matthew Hurst, director of science and innovation for Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a company that analyzes Internet trends for businesses, … [has created a map that] distributes blogs in visual space based on how much they link to each other. “If things are very close to each other, it means they talk to each other a lot,” he says. “When you do this analysis, you inevitably end up with a large percentage of blogs that are just floating around by themselves because they don’t have a lot of in or out links The size of the circles on Mr. Hurst’s map indicates the numbers of links to the blogs. The colors of the circles show the type of blog software used or on what kind of server the sites are hosted….”

This brings home the perhaps obvious point that the most popular blogs and bloggers — those positioned near the center on slide 3 — reference their peers more often than they do new or less-popular blogs. Which makes sense; we all write about what we know, and what we learn about is greatly influenced by what already know. Yet I was pleasantly surprised that the periphery was as active and interconnected as depicted.

As the success of social software tools like Del.icio.us and Flickr have made clear, the voice of the people can be a powerful tool in finding “the good stuff.” Interestingly, “good” is not really defined — as long as there’s an unspoken consensus of what is “good,” those items rise to the top. However, I do wonder how much equally “good stuff” never gets seen by the masses because it doesn’t attract the attention of the few in the center. Perhaps my misgivings are unfounded and the vast majority of the “good stuff” — yours, mine, and your Aunt Petunia’s — is brought to the surface precisely because the masses of the public are sure to find it and gently “Digg” it to the surface through word of blog.

Full Text Health Articles FeedNavigator

Pasi Keski-Nisula at the National Library of Health Sciences – Terkko (part of the University of Helsinki) was kind enough to let me know of a new service he has developed. FeedNavigator is a personalizable feed navigator for health sciences information.
In addition to aggregating (and providing search capabilities) for more than 1500 relevant RSS feeds, it also lets you save articles to your own space (“MyFeeds”). Citations for useful items useful to you can be exported to RefWorks. Users of the system who are patrons of several Finnish libraries can access full text through either an SFX (a common OpenURL link resolver) or document delivery service.
The service is free for use by anyone — though a free user registration is required.

BlogBridge Library

Catalogablog notes a new product from BlogBridge called BlogBridge: Library. BlogBridge Library is a server-based tool that libraries — or anyone with a large customer base — can use to organize a multitude of RSS feeds into a coherent and nicely-presented interface. In their post announcing the new product, BlogBridge says:

BlogBridge:Library (BBL) creates a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization. It will be the ‘store’ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here’s the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization.

BBL is not an aggregator. Rather, it’s a tool that says it will make organizing RSS feeds for customer use easier. Individual topics can be assigned to different editors within an organization. Individual feeds and topical collections are available to the end user through RSS and OPML links, respectively.
I’ll be curious to get my hands on a copy when the software itself is released. BlogBridge, the parent product, is open-source; there’s no indication on the BlogBridge site that I can find about whether BBL will be distributed that way or not.

Open-Access Digital Archive

The University of Michigan libraries have released a new digital archive, Deep Blue. Deep Blue aims:

… to provide access to the work that makes Michigan a leader in research, teaching, and creativity. By representing our faculty, staff, and student scholars, as individuals and as members of communities, Deep Blue provides a framework for preserving and finding the best scholarly and artistic work done at the University.

The library is offering its academic research colleagues permanence in the digital environment for research work. They acknowledge something more: by publishing through the University, the scholar’s works gain the weight of a major research institution. They’ve launched with an impressive collection of nearly 24,000 digital works, dating as far back as the 1950s. Access to some materials may be restricted based on the work’s copyright requirements, but much, if not the vast majority, of the collection is available in full text to everyone.
Now what they really need is RSS feeds for their author, topic, and collection lists…. But that will come, I’m sure.

[Via The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog.]

Education as Marketing Tool

Jill Stover, in her “Library Marketing — Thinking Outside the Book” blog, points to a press release from Powered, Inc., describing research Powered did on the impact of online education. The release highlights the findings that 90% of their study group of 200,000 consumers who participated in online education programs are likely to recommend the experience to a friend, and 94% of respondents have a more favorable perception of the brand because of the experience.
While the study was focused on commercial ventures, Jill notes:

What does this mean for libraries? A lot. Marketing is becoming less about pushing stuff out to people, and more about empowering them to succeed. Library instruction is one great way to do that as patrons gain valuable knowledge skills while librarians are positioned as experts on particular topics. … Faculty may appreciate lessons on RSS that help them keep up with the literature in their fields; new mothers may like guidance on how to find the best free resources on childhood development.”

Jill makes an excellent point. The resources libraries have to offer, combined with librarians’ traditional emphasis on personalize and detailed research assistance, creates a powerful marketing tool. Offering how-to classes on technologies — and on subjects — is a good way to show patrons the value of the library. With libraries’ patron base increasingly relying on the Internet to use the library, online education is the way to go.