RSS

This has been a fascinating lesson--to see so many blogs out there and to see how few subscribers most have, for obvious reasons. After reading a few, I recognised the democracy of it, and the similarity from one to the next. We are truely talking quantity here, not necessarily quality.

(When I finish this course, I will do my best to make a 'knock their socks off blog' aiming to put new interpretations to information rather than simply reporting what interests me, which most seem to do. )

I spent some time viewing sites on reading, book awards, publishing and bookselling before moving to those suggested in the lesson. I found scattered information everywhere and a limited number of blogs that attempt to analyse or synthesize information to any purpose. The antithesis, really, of all the training given to librarians.

I ended up selecting five sites related to reading, libraries, cataloguing, libraries 2.0 (Lighthouse) as well as the PHM's picture of the day, Susan Wyndham's 'undercover' from the SMH and Librarybytes. These look like they will be useful and carry a limited amount of dross. I will be very busy just reading these let alone sharing or tagging...my biggest question is how to delete those that are irrelvant or that I no longer need to keep!

I will use the posts to keep abreast of current developments in the same way I now use Library link, e-mail and published material. Obviously there will need to be some reprioritising! The advantage is that I will not have to copy and handwrite notes on paper articles to share these as I do now, but will use an online approach to sharing. It will save a few trees too.

A benefit for those of us at the Library will be that we can share more easily with one another to build on 'invisible colleges' relating to shared interests which will be really useful as we work our way through the redevelopment of the Library's service delivery platform. We can also use the facility is to easily create or develop communities of interest with our colleagues in other libraries, particularly in the public library network; stakeholders and clients.