Free your content! RSS for Libraries

SirsiDynix Institute is offering a free webinar called “Free your content! RSS for Libraries“, on August 7, 2007 at 11:00 AM Eastern time featuring Paul Pival —Distance Education Librarian, University of Calgary and Meredith Farkas —Distance Learning Librarian, Norwich University.

Paul and Meredith will describe what RSS is and how to use it in a variety of ways in libraries: to make it easier for users to find out about your collections and programs, to push subject-related content to patrons, and to publish dynamic content on a variety of pages. There are many tools that make generating RSS feeds, subscribing to RSS feeds, displaying RSS feeds and mixing RSS feeds an incredibly simply proposition for those with little technical knowledge. In addition, they will show you how to use RSS to easily keep up with the topics you are interested in without having to visit multiple websites each day.

Since this is one of my department workplans for this year I’ll try to watch it but if not, I can always catch the podcast later. RSS is one of the 2.0 things I think BCPL should implement for our customers this year.

Week 9, Thing 21: Discover some useful tools for locating podcasts

I am a HUGE fan of listening to podcasts. I use iTunes and download all sorts of podcasts, some library related but also some on cooking, genealogy, and technology. I also like to listen to some NPR podcasts because I never managed to catch the ones I like when I’m actually listening to the radio. I like podcasts because I can listen to what I want, when I want and actually where I want if I’m using my iPod. Mostly this means that I can listen to podcasts while I’m driving to and from work instead of listening to eighty zillion bring commercials.
I love This American Life, “First-person stories and short fiction pieces that are touching, funny, and surprising. Hosted by Ira Glass, from WBEZ Chicago Public Radio. In mp3 and updated Mondays”. If you haven’t listened to it yet, you should. I usually add it to my iPod using iTunes but in order to do my “things” I found the RSS feed for the free radio podcast and added that to my Bloglines account. Just as easy as adding any other RSS feed.

For library-related content I highly recommend the SirsiDynix Institute podcasts. Here’s the link to their feed. There’s a podcast on Gaming in the Library, Mashups, Hopping into Library 2.0 : Experiencing Lifelong Learning and more.

I used Podcast Alley to look for some genealogy podcasts that I didn’t already know about and found Genealogy Gems. I’ll try that out later. A genealogy podcast that I’ve listened to since it began about 2 years ago is The Genealogy Guys. It runs for abut an hour and is usually interesting listening if you’re into genealogy.