This is a “virtual handout” for a presentation to the University of the Pacific, October 19, 2005, Stockton, California. It has been updated and expanded from a presentation to the CARL North Information Technology Interest Group, August 12, 2005, at the MLK Library in San Jose, California.
What’s a Blog, Anyway?
A blog is a website powered by software that simplifies publishing, organizing, and syndicating Web content. Blogs range from the highly personal to the commercial and/or professional. As an emerging genre similar to epistolary forms, the tone of many blogs is conversational, informal, and “in the moment,” even when posts are carefully crafted.
Popular blogging tools include Movable Type, TypePad, WordPress, and Blogger. Blogger and Typepad are ideal if you do not have server access and need a hosted solution. WordPress and Movable Type are both good choices if you can install and configure software on your server (both appear to be very Linux-friendly). Most blogs offer simple archiving, search, and browse capabilities so that content is permanently discoverable.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. With RSS you publish the feed in one place (like this blog entry), and distribute it through readers, other websites, etc. RSS is to blogs as fatwood is to fires: RSS greatly spreads and accelerates the publication process. Most blogs have RSS feeds which you can subscribe to with special blog-reading software such as Bloglines (free, easy, and Web-based), or read through another tool such as Outlook or Firefox.
(Some feeds do not have blogs! Library examples include MPOW, Merln MIPALs, and this government safety recall site. A feed is really just an bit of special code, written in XML, that updates whenever content associated with it is updated.)
What Can Be Blogged?
Text, pictures, audio, video–you name it!
Finding Blogs and Feeds
For library blogs, to start with, see Peter Scott’s index or Blogbib. Bloglines has a great blog referral service. Technorati is good for seeing what’s hot-hot-hot in the blogosphere.
Another way is to find a handful of blogs you like and see what blogs they talk about, or look at their blogrolls.
Reading Blogs Regularly: The Aggregator
An aggregator (blog reader) makes it easy to organize and track the blogs you are reading, and also serves as an alert service for when your reading list is updated. Bloglines is a great aggregator to start with because it’s free, easy, and web-based. See LII’s tutorial.
Blogs with What’s New Capabilities
Many libraries use blogging/RSS for their “what’s new” capability. See the “what’s new” section for Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. That’s fed by an RSS feed. Jimmy Ghaphery told me, “We already had created a ColdFusion driven system for inputting the What’s New content to be published on our website, so it was pretty easy to pull it out into RSS format.” Two other libraries using RSS for a main-page “what’s new” capability are Northwestern and Simon Fraser University.
Of course, MPOW offers its newsletter this way as well. We had a programmer write our feed.
Georgia State University Library uses blogs to promote their services; their service is beautifully developed.
Blogging for All
The University Libraries at Minnesota host blogs for the entire campus, explaining in their interesting FAQ that they do this “to promote intellectual freedom, to help build communities of interest on campus, to investigate the connections between blogging and the traditional academic enterprise, and to retain the cultural memory of the institution.”
Library Services Using Blogs and/or RSS
Ken Varnum tracks innovative uses for RSS in libraries, and he points us all to a good collection of Journals with RSS Feeds at the University of Saskatchewan.
Dave Walker at San Carlos just wrote RSS Creator to enable you to make feeds for any journals.
Virginia Commonwealth also has an interesting test page of aggregated feeds. They use ColdFusion to grab the feeds hourly and then write them to an html page. For MPOW, every hour it grabs a random item.
Library Programs: Hennepin County Library
New Books: Kenton County Public Library
A patron happily sharing his reserve list: http://vielmetti.typepad.com/
Ann Arbor District Library, feed syndicated on another site
U. Winnipeg using CBC News
Yorba Linda Public Library presents senior sites from LII
U. Manitoba recommends feeds to patrons
ProQuest is planning to offer “roll your own” feeds for ProQuest searches.
Why You Care
Syndicated content (such as RSS feeds) helps the library reach people where they are, through blog-finding tools, blog-reading software, and web links. The library becomes less remote, more accessible, and more interactive.
LII (a website I’ve heard about) has an RSS success story. After a year of offering a feed, it has over 9,000 RSS subscribers through Bloglines alone, and the subscriptions have been geometric: 3,000 have subscribed since August 2005. In the past year, LII usage has risen 90% (it had been going up nicely every year, say about 50%, but this was a very nice bump, based on a steady increase all year that–how about that–paralleled subscriptions to our RSS feed).
NEW! Tools for Adding Feeds to Your Page!
First, note, if you have almost any blog, it produces a feed. So that’s an easy way to generate the feed in the first place.
Next, if you don’t have server access, but you can get your tech person to add a link or otherwise slightly modify a webpage, there are some great tools that will present content for you.
When you don’t have server/script/root access:
Feed2JS You can also use Feed2JS on your own server, but its chief virtue is its ability to take any feed and generate a nifty customized widget to present news on YOUR site with just a simple modification to a webpage.
Two other tools I’ve heard of:
Feedroll (Javascript)
RSS Digest (Javascript or HTML)
When you can parse RSS on your own server…
Magpie seems to be the parser of choice, though some folks just roll their own. Here are several other parsers (no votes of confidence here, just repeating some tips shared with me):
RSSMix (combines multiple feeds into one)
Things I Talked About Today
I explained these terms: blog, feed, RSS, aggregator (blog reader), blogroll, podcast, and vlog.
I demonstrated examples of using blogs and RSS for what’s new pages, newsletters, journal delivery service, and patron information.
I demonstrated several blog-finding tools, including Technorati, Bloglines, and Peter Scott’s index. I also showed you a blogroll.
Posted on this day, other years:
Good article. You do a nice job of summarizing tools and methods. You may want to add a section about spam blogs (splogs).
I’m in Minneapolis and didn’t know about Hennepin County’s feeds so that was useful and fun to explore. The Minneapolis Public Library also has some RSS feeds.
http://www.mplib.org/rss.asp
You might want to check out the Walker Art Center blog system.
http://blogs.walkerart.org/index.wac
Thanks for the link. I ended up taking down my reserve list from my weblog for a bunch of reasons unrelated to the technology involved. (I still think it’s a good idea, but I decided to put it on a private page instead of a public page for now.)
You can see my production notes for it here:
http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2005/07/colophon_books_.html
which involves using Feedburner to handle the RSS-to-Javascript part of the equation.
Neato stuff, gents. Edward, I still have a Powerpoint screen capture of your public reserve list, which is something I’d love to do on my blog. I’m sorry you took it down but can understand that stuff happens. I find “what am I thinking about reading” one of the nicest ways to meet people.
Peter, thanks for the extra links and for the spam-blog suggestion. I keep giving this talk, and every time it gets a thicker patina. I also have to thank Jenny “Shifted Librarian” Levine, who did a lot of the research leading to the new resources added to my post.
Karen, thanks. Every so often I think about how I can get the reserve list up again for public use, and I know that when I see it more I tend to put more books on hold. (So many more that there is not always time to read them all!)
Karen – my reserve sidebar is back – thanks for noticing it and I’ll think of more ways to make it useful. It’s tempting to also have a “books I currently have checked out” list, since I do have two other library cards in the family that could be used for privacy needs.
Reserve lists are candy stores for the brain!