October
17-20,
2004
Federal Depository Library Conference
October
17-20,
2004
News Blogs for Depositories
Since I was starting from practically zero knowledge of the topic, I feel I learned a great deal. The first part of the presentation was pretty general, covering what exactly blogs are and what some of their potential uses can be in government information work. It also gave a little blog history, advantages/disadvantages of blogs, how to find and use blogs and feeds, etc. Of particular interest were the listings of documents-related sites, including several agency news pages that offer RSS feeds, as well as listings of library blogs and useful sites with blog-related tools.
Here are some of the major links:
The presenter also went over things to consider when setting up a blog, based on her own experience with setting up her blog at Georgia State.
The second part of this first presentation was more technical, but a good, clear description of exactly what makes blogging work. I was surprised and pleased to learn that it's just a good application of XML. This presenter also gave some interesting ideas for future uses of the technology; since RSS feeds can be created from any structured data source (such as a MARC record) there are possibilities of using our catalogs, or at least future versions of them, to do current awareness for faculty, for example. Or, conceivably, GPO could send cataloging data for docs to us using this method.
Aggregation and Syndication: Government Information Overload Control and Exchange with Rich Sites Summary (RSS)
Presentation available online at http://www.mcfdl.wayne.edu/gpo2004/ .
This presentation was exhaustively focused on how librarians can use newsreaders and RSS feeds to provide content to themselves as well as to users.
Samson focused on free RSS reader/blog sites such as www.bloglines.com and showed how librarians can use them to aggregate content from library- or government info-related blogs and news sources.
Samson discussed how the future of aggregation/syndication for the transmission of learning objects between educators/instruction librarians.
