RSS Continued…
The feeds from the Seattle Public Library was interesting, but also a little… scattered? I don’t know that someone who would read a book called Chick Living: Frugal and Fabulous would also be interested in a book called Pretend Play and Young Children’s Development. It works well in theory, but I think it’s a problem of classification, not the software. (And again, I think this would work well for a department or a faculty—especially if the department were studying something esoteric.) The ProQuest RSS Feeds has suggestions for professors that are eerily similar. I thought their Dissertations & Theses feed was an interesting idea, and their breakdown of sociology (what I did my undergrad in) was fairly comprehensive. Sociology is a pretty large discipline, so I don’t think it’s outrageous that a scholar wouldn’t have heard about twenty or twenty-five new dissertations in a given category. This could be really useful.
The Hollenback article’s focus on collaboration between the tools we’ve been discussing and experimenting with was interesting. I haven’t used Flickr, but I was a bit dismayed by his references to Friendster and Orkut. How many of these suckers do I have to sign up for to be considered socially networked? I already use (and hate) Facebook. I did find his comment that, “the real power of both Flickr and de.icio.us come from the concept of tagging” eerily reminicist of cataloguing (the imposition of order as that which separates us from the animals.) And I loved his imitation of Mac users (which I am not): “At this point some of you are saying, "Hey, what about this SuperNewsReaderPro I use on my Mac?” Damn you Mac users and your seemingly-supereverything.
The article about the successes of the University of Alberta libraries was interesting, but somewhat vague. I suppose I was expecting something with a result at the end of it (such and such number of students subscribed.) The article by Ian Winship was quite well written, even if it was a bit hurried, but I didn’t find anything new in it.
I really liked the quote at the beginning of the McKiernan article, which stated that “these do not amount to a revolution, but rather represent a step on the path to better information services, and one which takes advantage of advances in technology.” I also liked his focus on different types of libraries, including those, like legislative libraries, which are sometimes left to the fringes.
I am going to Feed2JS later in the week—I am having some internet difficulties this weekend which are making it excruciating for me to even leave the computer (lest my connection die again.) I will try to post about it later in the week, though.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
*giggle* Yay Macs!
*grin, duck, & run*
It seems to me that we are of one mind on much of this stuff. Facebook is a tool that can be interesting to explore, and it can connect you to other people, but I actually far rather the social networking setup of other tools (like my livejournal communities). And Macs seem to have such great features, which I can attest to because I used to use one at work. The problem for me is that I don't have a network of computer experts who know anything about Mac, and all of my computer investment is in non-Mac-frendly versions of software and peripherals.
I really like the idea of being able to create your own feed based on search strings. The degree of personalization is what I find fantastic. I wonder if that would allow me to do with del.icio.us what I would like to do (create complex searches of tags). I don't think so, as the base application does not allow such searches.
I guess this gives us many ideas of what we can try to implement in our future libraries, even though there are definitely some aspects that may seem painful to us.
Christy
Hi Christy,
How do you find livejournal for privacy? It seems appealing to me because of the blog-like features (you can rant about what you'd like), unlike Facebook, which seems set up mostly to just keep track of people. I worry too, that Facebook is seen by some people as just a fun place to hang out, and by others as this professional networking tool, so it's hard to strike the right tone.
yeah Lauralee, I was talkin' 'bout you. :-)
Leah,
Re LiveJournal and privacy - you can friendslock any posts you don't want to be available to the general public (those entries will only show up for people you've friended on LJ.) You can also have various levels of filters for your friendslist so that only some of them see certain posts...I don't bother with that, but I do friendslock things occasionally. Some stuff you don't want to be out there for just anyone on the interwebs to read. :) But some stuff I do want to be public - not everyone in my life has or wants an LJ account! - so the friendslocking thing is a good solution, I think.
Post a Comment