RSS Revisited

This week’s reading provided more or less a review of what we have already learned about RSS. However, it was nice to consolidate our learning and get a few more ideas about how RSS is being..and can be…used in libraries. McKiernan gave a good summary of the more common ways that libraries are using RSS for news and events, new acquisitions, search alerts. He also introduced a few ideas that I had not yet considered such as the promotion of Information Literacy and Reference Services. With libraries offering more and more RSS feeds, I believe strongly that thought must be given to the organization and classification of these feeds. Users depend on librarians to be effective “organizers of information” and this translates into RSS feeds that do not needlessly inundate their aggregators. Users should be able to pick and choose the content that will be “pushed” to them from their library through RSS.

I had not considered Winship's idea that libraries “should be guiding users to appropriate weblogs,” but it makes sense since we provide similar services with print resources, and some online resources (websites). In the future, will librarians also “index” and “classify” these resources like we do with traditional collections? It seems like applications like del.icio.us and flickR provide perfect platforms to begin such work…or to train and encourage users to do it themselves! Of course, introducing them to these new blogs provides a perfect conduit to provide training on RSS. Along the same lines, I support the authors idea to set up feeds of particular interest to the community or parts of the community. This seems like a good way to allow users to filter out information they don’t want and subscribe only to the content that interests them specifically.

It was neat to see that the author of the article Weblogs and RSS in information work admits to occasionally experiencing the same overwhelming feeling that I have recently felt: “Indeed it’s too easy to get overwhelmed by material when you just add one more source that looks interesting, and then another. And if you miss checking for a few days you could have hundreds of items to look at, so you might need to be firm about what you read.”

Of all the ideas that we have encountered for RSS in libraries, I find the idea of syndicating catalogue/web searches through RSS feeds. I agree with Reichardt that it is perfect solution for the busy researcher or avid reading library patron. I was also interested to learn that RSS can be used to migrate listserv emails to your aggregator instead. This is something that I will definitely have to try! Furthermore, according to Geoff Harder, Bloglines allows the user to respond from within the reader itself. Isn’t this what we’ve been looking for, Susan?
Finally, I was happy to get a quick and easy tutorial on the premise of flickR and further explanations of del.icio.us. I have never personally had time to experiment with flickR and so was happy to learn what it is really about. One question that I have about both applications is whether one can only share one’s web content with smaller communities rather than the whole wide world. Although I’ve meant to, I haven’t had time to look into this. For instance, if I don’t want to share my photos with everyone on FlickR, is there any way to “privatize” it?

Finally, I found it interesting that Hollenback notes that undergraduate students seem to be unaware of many social software applications. I am currently TAing an undergraduate course and am anxious to put this theory to the test in my next lab with them. I liked the final paragraph of the fourth article because it seemed to nicely tie everything that we’ve been talking about with blogs and RSS in a tidy way:

“The strength of RSS is how it acts as glue to bind Web services together. There's no doubt that sites such as Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us are each useful on their own. However, once you tie them together with RSS you create a powerful way to manage information on the Internet.”

In a side note, I'm happy to say that thanks to Heather, I've now figured out how to link to a permalink rather than just the generic blog URL. Thanks, Heather! Also Heather and I have been playing with Feedyes, and I think it's actually working. It took a while to kick in, but I got regular feeds today from a jobsite that doesn't offer an RSS feed. Still a few glitches to work out with format, but at least it works!