We are so 2.0!

Here's John Russell's post today from his blog ...Best!...Dream...Ever! This is really what web 2.0 is about, sharing ideas, posting from one blog or website to another. Are you reading any of the blogs by the our staff? Take a look through them, find a few that interest you, and add them to your reader. Don't forget to read the comments on the posts on this blog (and others). This is how a conversation gets going, and when the conversation is about library services, this is how change happens.

10 Ways Libraries Can Use RSS

Cheryl Wolfe from JFG added the following great post to her blog, The Moxie Librarian.

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Because using RSS is about sharing and delivering information, it seems perfectly natural for libraries to adopt this technology for library services. Here are my 10 ways for how libraries can use RSS.
10 Ways Libraries Can Use RSS
1. Create an RSS feed for new additions to the online catalog.
2. Create an RSS feed tied to a library card account for hold notifications and/or overdue materials.
3. Create an RSS feed for new programs and events posted on the library website.
4. Create an RSS feed for the library’s electronic newsletter.
5. Create an RSS feed for press releases and other media advisories.
6. Create an RSS feed for library closings, including emergency closings.
7. Create an RSS feed for library job openings.
8. Subscribe to a few RSS feeds, such as local news websites, and share the content on the library’s website. This could be included on a page containing other local resources and local links.
9. Subscribe to RSS feeds of interest to library customers and share the content on the customer’s personalized library webpage. Customers can choose to access selected RSS feeds, their library account information, subscription databases, and email/chat with a librarian all in one spot.
10. Subscribe to a few professional RSS feeds and share with library staff on the library intranet.

Finding RSS Feeds

Now that you've been exploring news feeds, you might wonder - "how do I find more?" or "does my favorite web site have one?"

Internet Explorer 7 (standard throughout the library) looks for feeds, also known as RSS feeds, on every webpage you visit. When it finds available feeds, the Feeds button, located on the Internet Explorer toolbar, will change from gray to orange.

To view available feeds...
On the Internet Explorer toolbar, click the Feeds button .
If multiple feeds are available, you'll see a list of available feeds. Select the feed you want to view. When you click the feed, you'll see a page displaying a list of items (topics and articles) you can read and subscribe to. Copy the URL to your feed reader to subscribe.

What formats do Feeds come in? The most common formats are RSS and Atom. Feed formats are constantly being updated with new versions. Internet Explorer supports RSS 0.91, 1.0, and 2.0, and ATOM .3, 1.0. All web feed formats are based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), a text-based computer language used to describe and distribute structured data and documents.

Lookybook!

Lookybook is a new, free, 2.0 site for parents, children's librarians, teachers, and kids, to use and love. It's in beta right now, but can you think of all the ways we can use this one?
Go ahead, click on the book. And keep clicking. Or click those googly orange eyes.

Learn More about RSS

Learn More is a series of Web 2.0 lessons posted on yet another library blog called Library Stream.
Here's a new one on RSS.
Several supervisors have asked if we can alphabetize the growing list of staff blogs on our hcplc=lib 2.0 blog. Well, we could, but they'd be sorted by blog name since that's how we entered them, not by staff name, so I'm not sure it would be all that helpful. But if you want to follow a few blogs, those of people whom you supervise, or just blogs you find interesting, why not subscribe to them on your news reader?
Need help? Take a look at some of the blog postings since we started this lesson last Monday, or look at the comments and ask someone who has already set one up to give you a hand.

A Library Toolbar

Look what the library in Columbus Ohio is now making available for its customers!

http://www.columbuslibrary.org/ebranch/index.cfm?pageid=209

Why Meebo?

A few weeks ago during the IM and Virtual Reference part of our training we were using a Meebo room to investigate the virtues of chat. Here's an interesting post from David Lee King's blog on how it works in his library. Don't forget to click on through to Helene Blower's post on her blog to see his inspiration. And Helene is quoting from yet another blog....

101 BLOGS!

What an amazing response from our hardworking staff!

All 101 training participants will be having fun and learning.

One will win an iPod Shuffle!

Let them come to you

The more blogs I read, the more I click on the blogs that their writers read and refer to in their posts and next thing I know I have another blog, or ten, I want to stay up to date on. I started with only a few library blogs and now there are more and more that are of interest to me. It can be time consuming, and frustrating, to have to go looking for new posts. And then there are the newspaper blogs, the theater blogs, oh, I could go on and on. Until I hooked up with Google Reader. There are other readers out there, of course, but I'm going to focus on this one today because it is the one I use. And because, since most of you set up your blogs using blogger, also a Google product, you already have gmail accounts. So with one login you have your email, your blog, and your news reader at your fingertips. (There's much more but that's for another time.) It's all so easy to use, and to tie together. But if you would like some help, here's a short tour, here's a short video (a bit dated but you'll get the idea), and here's the official Google Reader blog.

#4 - RSS, News Feeds & Newsreaders

Learning Objectives

• Learn about RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
• Be able to subscribe to a feed and use a newsreader/news aggregator.


• RSS in Plain English (tutorial on YouTube)
  

Skills Practice

• Locate a few library related blogs and/or news feeds and subscribe to them using a free newsreader (like Bloglines or Google Reader).
• Locate a few RSS feeds that interest you personally and subscribe to them.

Experience Sharing

• Share your library related feeds with the hcplc=Lib2.0 blog.
• Share your experience with RSS feeds on your 2.0 Learning blog - What is the feed address for your blog?
• How would you use RSS in the library?

Resources

1. Library Technology Reports (July/August, 2006) - "RSS."
2. "RSS" - on Wikipedia.
3. SirsiDynix Institute. "Free Your Content? RSS for Libraries."
4. Check out the blog, RSS4Lib.

2.0 Alphabet

is for Furl , from Look-Smart (remember them?). It's kind of like an online filing cabinet that lets you save, store, and share Web pages of interest. As with del.icio.us, you can get an RSS feed of the most popular items that people are currently Furling.

Furl is a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us or Simpy, Furl enables members to bookmark, annotate, and share web pages. Topics are used to categorize saved sites, similar to the tagging feature of other social websites. Additionally, a user may write comments, save clippings, assign each bookmark a rating and keywords (which are given greater weight while searching), and have an option of private or public storage for each topic or item archived.
Considered one of its main features, Furl also privately archives a complete copy of the html of each page that a user bookmarks, making it accessible even if the original content is modified or removed, an antidote for link rot. This also allows full text searches to be made within the archive. However, as highlighted under limitations below, images that are embedded using links are not archived with user's copy of the html page, so images may disappear over time. [Wikipedia]

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 1 (letters A - M) were originally published in Information Today 24.9 (Oct 2007): p.17(2).

Teens @ the Library

Our discussions of blogs would be incomplete without pointing to our very own HCPLC teen blog. It was created a year ago and published in time to celebrate the first Teen Tech Week. Updated faithfully by a dedicated team of librarians and LTAs, it provides comments on just about everything that might interest teens in our community including the results of the Gaming Tournament Qualifier Events.

This Week's 2.0 Book

For more examples of how libraries are using blogs and RSS feeds, take a look at Blogging & RSS, a Librarian's Guide by Michael P. Sauers (Medford, N.J : Information Today, 2006).

Libraries increasingly use blogs and RSS feeds to reach out to users, while librarians blog daily on a range of personal and professional topics. The way has been paved by the tech-savvy and resource-rich, but any library or librarian can successfully create and syndicate a blog today. In this readable book, author, Internet trainer, and blogger Michael P. Sauers, M.L.S., shows how blogging and RSS technology can be easily and effectively used in the context of a library community. Sauers showcases interesting and useful blogs, shares insights from librarian bloggers, and offers step-by-step instructions for creating, publishing, and syndicating a blog using free Web-based services, software, RSS feeds, and aggregators.

Michael P. Sauers is the Internet trainer for BCR's Member Services Division, and a part time reference librarian for the Arapahoe County Library District. He is currently on the Board of Trustees for the Aurora Public Library and the board of the Friends of the Aurora Public Library. He is the author of seven books on technology for librarians and has written dozens of articles for library industry journals. [Amazon.com Review]

Icarus

This blog for customers of the Santa Fe Public Library has contributors from staff throughout the system. One of the nicest of its kind I have seen. And look how they put that catalog search box right there.

Blogging Journals

Following up on Andrew's post, quite a lot, maybe all, of the professional journals we read already have seriously invested in the 2.0 world. Blogs, and e-newsletters are common now, and so much more timely than the print journals, especially if you get them routed through the system. I often find that by the time I get a journal I have already read the news, and sometimes the articles, online. Lately even the reviews are becoming available. Lots of the content, however, is exclusive to the web. Book Group Buzz is a Booklist blog that is really valuable if you run, or participate in, a book club.

More than the Front Desk

Darien Library has lots of blogs, btw. They have a consistent look and are all for the public as well as staff. I particularly like their book blog, and the ones for children and young adults. And their community blog is a great service. Even their director blogs.

Professional Journals as Blogs?

That's what Marcus Banks thinks. Take a look at his latest blog entry on the subject.
He's became firmly convinced that the traditional journal model is antiquated for sharing research and knowledge among librarians. A better course is to develop and nurture excellent blogs, with multimedia capabilities and guaranteed preservation of the postings. This could be an entirely new blog that starts from scratch, or an established journal that evolves into a blog.

What do you think?

Blogs 4 U

Have you found lots of great blogs to read? In our next lesson we'll talk about how to keep all this good stuff under control, but for now, in case you have not yet found a few blogs of interest to you, let me tell you about Technorati. This is a website that tracks blogs, 112.8 million of them to date. Here's a bit about blogs in general from Technorati:
A blog, or weblog, is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others vie for readership with national newspapers. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them.
Blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. They engage the writer and reader in an open conversation, and are shifting the Internet paradigm as we know it.
On the World Live Web, bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation. Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos, videos etc. We rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and so we monitor these live communities and the conversations they foster.
The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.
You can take a look at the most popular blogs according to Technorati right here.

And here are just a couple of interesting blogs I am sharing today.
At the Darien Library, the public service staff have their own blog that they are encouraged to post to, The Front Desk Speaks. I love this recent post.
If you are having a stressful day, try a one minute meditation at this very unusual blog, Moments of Rest.

59 Blogs and counting...

Yes, that's right - there are already 59 blogs linked to hcplc=Lib 2.0! You still have until next Monday to get your blog created to be able to fully participate in the remaining training sessions - don't forget to send the URL in a comment to the workbook section #3 - Blogs & Blogging.


Do blogs really have global reach? Sure they do. Just check out a comment on Julie Troupe's very first blog posting on her Storytime Staples blog...she mentions using the book "One Frog Sang" and the author of the book - Shirley Parenteau -left a really great comment.


I guess you could say - "One Blog Sang."

How's your blogging?

2.0 Alphabet

is for eSnips is a free, web 2.0 interest-driven social sharing site that allows users to share content and promote their creations and form social niche communities around their specific areas of interest. Members can upload and share content in any file type from one centralized profile, in folders representing their different areas of interest, and can determine the audience for each folder. eSnips is a Flickr type service for data files.

We've already used eSnips to view the survey results from the "How 2.0 R U?" survey.

There are many free online Image Storing and File Sharing sites:

flickr - zoto - glide effortlessly - Shutterbook - Fotolia - iStockPhoto - PhotoBucket - fotki - BubbleShare - openomy - xdrive - omnidrive

Allmydata - Avvenu - SendSpace - eSnips - StreamLoad - Wiki upload - Pickle

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 1 (letters A - M) were originally published in Information Today 24.9 (Oct 2007): p.17(2).