Zetoc RSS Table of Contents Service from the British Library

Zetoc, the British Library’s electronic Table of Contents service, now offers table of contents RSS feeds for a vast number of online journals. Available to Zetoc members only, this new service is described in the May 2006 D-Lib Magazine. For subscribers, the RSS feed links you to the British Library’s document delivery service as well as to an institutional OpenURL resolver for locally licensed versions of the articles.
Ah, to be in England….

More Geographic Blogging

In an earlier post (Geotagging, posted on 17 June 2005), I talked about an extension to RSS that would allow for encoding of geographic metadata into an RSS feed.
GeoNames RSS to to GeoRSS Converter takes this one logical step further. The GeoNames service takes an RSS feed, searches each entry for recognizable geographical locations, and returns a feed with the appropriate geographical metadata added on. And if you then view the feed through a GeoRSS newsreader (as the GeoNames web site points out, there aren’t many of these; they suggest the ACME GeoRSS Reader), you get a map with the locations of the item being discussed in the RSS entries.
This is perfect for news feeds — get a map of the world with the locations of the each news item shown on screen. As an example, take a look at today’s Reuters news. You can see where in the world the news is happening.
On a smaller scale, it might have great application in a library for local news, genealogical research, community events, and so forth. Let people pull up a map of events and pick the ones closest to their houses. Very neat stuff!

[Via RSS Specifications.]

RSS Book Publishing Timeline

I never knew that anyone was publishing books via RSS in a serial format… But apparently, they are, and have been for some time. A brief history of this novel (excuse the pun) serialization technique can be found at Names@Work. (This site is a plug for post is about the book Pulse: The Coming of Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things, which is being published via RSS and email in serial format at this site.)
[28 October 2006: As noted by Antony in the comment below, I mischaracterized his site in my original post. I’ve edited the text to clear up my misconception.]

Serendipity at Risk?

A colleague forwarded me a link to an essay (“The Endangered Joy of Serendipity“) published in the St. Petersburg Times on March 26. In this essay, William McKeen, a journalism professor at the University of Florida, discusses what he describes as the loss of context that has come with Google, RSS aggregators, and much of the Internet. McKeen requires his freshman journalism class to subscribe to the paper version of the New York Times because readers of the online version will only find what they’re looking for.

So what’s the problem with finding what you’re looking for? McKeen writes,

Nuance gives life its richness and value and context. If I tell the students to read the business news and they try to plug into it online, they wouldn’t enjoy the discovery of turning the page and being surprised. They didn’t know they would be interested in the corporate culture of Southwest Airlines, for example. They just happened across that article. As a result, they learned something – through serendipity.

I agree with McKeen that serendipity is a wonderful thing. Heck, if you look at my career path to date (from Soviet Studies to archivist to techy librarian in just 12 years), you’ll understand what I mean. But as our search tools get better — and our RSS feeds get more specific — what are we missing in life? McKeen writes,

Technology undercuts serendipity. It makes it possible to direct our energies all in the name of saving time. Ironically, though, it seems that we are losing time – the meaningful time we once used to indulge ourselves in the related pleasures of search and discovery. We’re efficient, but empty.

This brings to the surface something I’ve noticed only subconsciously — I rarely stumble on really cool web sites anymore. Back in the day (the first years of the web, 1993-1997), I would often find myself doing a web search on AltaVista and getting all sorts of hits that were something much better than utterly wrong: they were interesting. Now that I use Google (or today’s AltaVista, for that matter), I don’t find myself stumbling down the “wrong” path nearly so often. And when I do, it’s not nearly wrong enough to be good.

The same is true with the feeds I’ve chosen to put in to my aggregator. While there’s still some opportunity for serendipity in the not-so-random choices of my favorite bloggers, it’s limited serendipty. By subscribing to feeds, I’m picking my headlines in advance, and somehow feel I’m missing good stuff. Even my keyword search feeds in Technorati and Bloglines are narrow (I haven’t struck the balance between specific enough to be manageable and broad enough to be interesting). Again, I’m not necessarily looking for good stuff that’s germane, but good stuff that makes me stop and think.

Which brings me, circuitously, to the role of libraries and librarians. As we build information systems to enable “Library 2.0,” we must remain cognizant of overtuning the system. I certainly don’t want to find just exactly what I’m looking for all the time. There are occasions — frequently — when I’m browsing and want to learn something orthogonal to my actual question. I just don’t realize it until I’ve found the catty-corner path and gone down it. I suppose this is not that much different from the shift from card catalog to OPAC, but it’s still a shift.

If we do not help people find what they didn’t know they were looking for, we will, to quote McKeen again,

The modern world is conspiring against serendipity. But we cannot blame technology. I’ve met this enemy, and it is us. We forget: We invented this stuff. We must lead technology, not allow technology to lead us. The world is a better and more cost-effective place because of technology, but we’ve lost the imperfections inherent in humanity – the things that make life a messy and majestic catastrophe. We must allow ourselves to be surprised. We must relearn how to be human, to start again as we did as children – learning through awkward and bungling discovery.

Feed Filters

FeedRinse is a web-based service that lets you filter your feeds. For the price of a free registration, you can filter up to five RSS feeds. For $4 or $6 a month, you get to filter more feeds and do more with them, depending on the level of your subscription.
Each filter can be fairly complex — feeds that match (or don’t match) a given keyword, tag, or author. So you could search the New York Times’ headlines feed for all entries that contain the word “Washington” but don’t contain the word “Congress” and are written by your favorite reporter. Your filtered feed list can then be exported as an OPML file and read in your favorite aggregator. (The filtered feeds are redirected through FeedRinse.)
What seems to be lacking from the service at present is a way to easily apply the same filter to many different feeds. But as Steve Matthews points out in his blog post on this subject, you can use other services such as RSSMix to do the building of a single feed, which then could be filtered through FeedRinse.

[Thanks to Steve Matthews of the Vancouver Law Librarian Blog for telling me about this one.]

Blogging to Better Library Service

Once again, Paul Pival at Distant Librarian has scooped me on a truly cool use of RSS to improve library service.
Paul wrote about Intuitive Revelations: The Ubiquitous Reference Model in AltRef, Brian Matthews’ blog. In his article, Brian describes an experiment he conducted at Georgia Tech. The experiment followed 40 Georgia Tech students’ blogs. He subscribed using Bloglines and set uph keyword searches for words such as “library,” “assignment,” and similar terms. When he found blog entries related to the students’ academic needs, he posted comments in their blog pointing them toward useful resources.
Brian concludes, in part:

Blogs allow us to interact with students in their natural
environment, and to provide timely, meaningful, and intuitive assistance. Reaching
out to students creates a personal connection. It allows them to see us as allies,
rather than as part of the academic bureaucracy. Monitoring blogs also gives
librarians a sense of ubiquity, empowering us to follow the whims, needs,
expectations, and experiences of the population we serve…

Isn’t that what librarianship is all about?

Clever Use of Tag Clouds

The University of Western Ontario’s office of Communications and Public Affairs offers a directory of blogs published by members of the UWO community. Not only is the directory a good idea, but they also provide a tag cloud that covers the content in all these different blogs. To see the cloud, look at the top of their main weblog page.
The tag cloud shows a summary of all of the blogs under this umbrella. Some are personal, some are project-based, some are from academic departments — they run the gamut. The blogs may be on a UWO server or they may be hosted elsewhere — as long as the blogger has let UWO know they’re part of that community, they’re included. Very clever.
The tag cloud itself is generated through TagCloud.com. I’d be curious to know if anyone has developed an open source tag cloud generator — something that would take a set of RSS feeds and generate clouds… I can see that being very handy for a number of libraries, or other institutions. If you know of one, let me know in the comments.

[Via Blog Without a Library.]

RSS for Teens at the Library

Over at the Alternative Teen Services blog is an informative summary of public libraries using various “library 2.0” tools to attract and communicate with teen audiences. Also listed links to libraries using pod- and vod-casts.
If your library’s audience includes this younger set (and even for university libraries whose students are a bit older) — take note. These technologies are the way your next generation of library users (i.e., people paying, one way or another, for the library) is familiar with communicating.