Aquabrowser updates

I just discovered that Aquabrowser, one of our catalogs, has been adding web 2.0 functionality. They already had the ability to add RSS feeds in the catalog although BCPL has not turned that feature on yet.

1) Now  the company has added something they call “My Discoveries” which offers:

• Lists that users can make for themselves or make public to help others
• Tagging, Reviewing and Scoring on any item
• Personal profiles

AquaBrowser connects people and knowledge by offering user tagging and user reviews on any item in your collection. This kind of social searching perfectly combines human intelligence with search algorithms to perform information retrieval. User tags and reviews from the local library users will only add to the ability of community libraries to be tailored for the people they are intended, because those very people will be giving their input to almost every dynamic of the library catalog.

2) AquaBrowser now allows all the item records in a library’s collection to be indexed and found by any internet search engine, as if to create a separate web page for every title in the library’s collection. This means any item in the entire collection can be found as a search result when performing a regular web search, driving traffic to the library website and allowing anyone to discover its community valuable information. The more accessible a library is online, the more the community uses and benefits from it. This information can be found in the Archive section of MediaLab’s website.

How to explain RSS the Oprah way

Okay, so this won’t appeal to everyone … but How to explain RSS the Oprah way  is a nice, clear explanation of RSS and how you might use it, done by Stephanie Quilao in her blog, Back in Skinny Jeans. I borrowed part of her very nice graphic but please visit her site to see the whole thing and read her “How-to” for RSS. The article was written as part of the ProBlogger 2006 “How to” Group Writing Project. Please visit Problogger for other wonderful “How tos.” Their current project is 31 Days to Building a Better Blog. It’s a month long series of posts at ProBlogger designed to walk you through 31 tasks that you can do to make your blog better.

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.

Things our library can do with RSS

Do you have other ideas?!

1. RSS feeds from the library catalog – searches to watch, favorite subject headings, favorite authors, new books, etc.
2. RSS feeds from library databases – searches to watch, etc.
3. That “what I have checked out” thing…
4. Library Calendar of Events feed
5. RSS feed of area happenings, coming from the library’s website
6. Updates on a library building project
7. Feeds from Flickr on building projects, library desks, “what do you have checked out?”

Week 4, Thing 9: Explore MERLIN and then locate a few other useful library-related blogs and/or news feeds

I subscribed to the feed for Merlin. Merlin is for Maryland library staff to learn about technology. I’ll need to look into this further! Now that we’ll be working on increasing our bandwidth, we’ll be able to offer more online education opportunities. I can’t wait – it’s going to make such a difference in everything the system can do.

I used Bloglines search tool and subscribed to the feed for my search. That’s pretty cool. We should be able to do that using Aquabrowser once they turn on the feature for us. People will be able to subscribe to a search of their favorite English mysteries or whenever BCPL gets new books on their favorite topic.

I also tried Technorati . I have lots of feeds about libraries and library 2.0 that I’ve collected over the past 9 months or so.

Week 4, Thing 8: Make Life Really Simple with RSS and a News Reader

I set up a Bloglines account a while ago when I was trying to learn about RSS. Its a great way for me to keep up with websites that I like on just about any subject. I have way more than 10 feeds: lots of library  and web/library 2.0 feeds as well as some for technology, cooking and genealogy.

I have several posts about RSS. Just click on the RSS category in the Tag Cloud and it will give you a list of all posts I’ve tagged with the RSS category. (Yikes – lots of jargon. Click on my RSS link or look at the links at the upper right of my blog and click on RSS. There’s a great video you should watch if you want a very simple explanation of RSS.)

I learned how to add a “Subscribe to Bloglines” button to my blog. People can use this to subscribe to the RSS feed for my blog. Why they’d want to is a whole different thing, but at least I learned how to do this! BTW, it only involves adding a text widget to a WordPress blog. Bloglines creates the HTML for the button using your feed URL. Then you just copy and paste the HTML into the text widget.

Its even easier in Blogger which many BCPLers are using for their blogs for 23 Things.

1.  Log into your blog.
2. Look at the addressbar for your blog. Example: http://baltimorecountyparticipants.blogspot.com/. Write down the name of your blog that appears where baltimorecountyparticipants is in this address.
3. Click on Customize (upper right hand corner of your blog) and then choose the tab for Template. Add a Page Element for “HTML/Javascript.” Copy and paste the following except replace baltimorecountyparticipants with the name of your blog.

<a href=”http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://baltimorecountyparticipants.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default” mce_href=”http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://baltimorecountyparticipants.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default”>
<img src=”http://static.bloglines.com/images/lang/default/sub_modern2.gif” mce_src=”http://static.bloglines.com/images/lang/default/sub_modern2.gif” border=”0″ alt=”Subscribe with Bloglines” />
</a>

Since I was creating widgets, I added one for the books I’m reading. That seems to be the “thing to do” for a lot of library staff bloggers I’ve found (not necessarily at BCPL).

I learned how to post a public link to my bloglines account but why would anyone be interested? And don’t they have enough to read?!

How to know when your library is in the news

David Rothman talks about applications that give us a metasearch (or federated search) that can collect the results of your search from several different search engines.

Read his post from his blog here, http://davidrothman.net/2006/09/18/how-to-know-when-your-organization-appears-in-the-news/ .

What is RSS?

I just discovered that we can offer RSS feeds in Aquabrowser, our library catalog. But a lot of people don’t really see the significance of being able to offer that to our customers so I thought I’d try to define it better.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically that means that you can create content in one place and display it in other places, such as RSS readers or aggregators, which pull in various subscribed feeds to let you read them all in one place.  According to Library Technology Reports “Web 2.0 & Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software” by Michael Stevens, “It is the back-end of XML-encoded content – from a blog or other source – that sits on the server behind your Web presence.” Whenever the web page or news site or blog or calendar of events gets updated, its’ RSS feed gets updated and any aggregator (or reader) subscribed to that feed is notified there is new contect available.

The very simplist explanation comes from Dave Winer, one of the pioneers of RSS technology, who says “It is automated web surfing. We took something a lot of people do, visiting sites looking for new stuff, and automated it.”

Why is this important for libraries? This means that the content from our library web pages and/or our catalog can now be displayed wherever our users are. People used to need to remember to come to our site or our catalog but now customers can subscribe to our content and it can be displayed anywhere.

Hennepin County Library (HCL) in Minnesota offers RSS on their website and in their catalog, http://www.hclib.org/ .

How to use a newsreader

Here is a tutorial for Bloglines, Using Bloglines (or How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday)

and check out this one and this one on Google Reader.

RSS in Plain English

Lee Lefever and his wife Sachi made this video for their friends (and ours) who haven’t yet felt the power of our friend the RSS reader. We want to convert people… if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn’t yet tried it, point them here for 3.5 minutes of RSS in Plain English.