Web 2.0 101: Week 1 RSS Feeds & Blogs

During week one of MLA's Web 2.0 101 CE course, we have been asked to reflect on how we envision using RSS feeds at our library and how we think our patrons could use RSS feeds.

At my library, we have set up an RSS feed for our library news posts. This is a good idea, but I don't think we have many subscribers. A couple of our liaison librarians write blogs to update their academic departments; again, they don't have many subscribers and the librarians end up sending notifications of posts via email. Apparently, we would need to do much more marketing to get folks to subscribe to the feeds. We have also discussed setting up a patron centered blog. An excellent example of such a blog from an academic library is Library Hacks from Duke University Libraries. Typical topics range from search tips to library hours to citing sources, all very practical and succinct. My concern about starting such a blog is writing sufficient content to post frequently and substantially. Time is a scarce resource at my library, as it is at many academic libraries, and I wonder how I or other library staff would carve out enough time to make the blog successful.

One of my projects for this summer is to develop a series of Web 2.0 workshops for our patrons, which is one of the reasons I am taking this CE. We envision that the series would include an introductory class about "What is Web 2.0 Anyway?", one on creating Wikis, online tools for collaboration, organizing and sharing information using social bookmarking, and, of course, staying current using RSS feeds. I hope that teaching these workshops is one way we can educate our users about tools like RSS readers so that they will take advantage of the RSS feeds we offer.

I'm also interested in teaching our users how to subscribe to RSS feeds to the tables of contents of journals. We haven't done much to support this, but I know that many libraries have pages on their site which indicate which journals have TOC feeds available, so that would be something we could consider doing. I've figured out how to successfully save and subscribe to feeds from saved searches in PubMed (see my previous post), but am extremely frustrated with the new RSS feeds option for saved searches in Ovid MEDLINE. There doesn't seem to be any way to embed the Libraries' link resolver in the feed. The notifications regarding new articles in my Bloglines doesn't even link to the complete reference in Ovid. So, receiving notifications via Bloglines is frankly darned frustrating, because I then have to go look up the citation in Ovid MEDLINE or PubMed. This is so inefficient that I don't see any reason to burden my patrons with it. The Krafty Librarian and Ratcatcher have written intelligent posts about this OvidSP goofiness.

I look forward to reading other folks posts about how they are using RSS feeds or envision using them at their libraries.