Well, I’m finally getting back to writing up my experience and thoughts of the 2005 NASIG conference. Sorry for the delay.
When I last left off, it was lunchtime on Friday. We all grabbed our boxed lunches and headed off to wherever we chose to eat them. In my case, it was the committee chairs’ meeting. This year, I’m the co-chair for the Electronic Communications Committee, which means among other things, I’m the “webspinner” for nasig.org. If you see anything that’s messed up on the site, let me know.
After lunch, I attended my third tactics session, “Do You See RSS In Your Future.” Both of the presenters, Paoshan Yue and Araby Green, come from the University of Nevada, Reno. The session began with a basic over-view of RSS, and then moved into how libraries are using RSS. Blogwithoutalibrary.net was mentioned as a resource for finding out what other libraries are doing with blogs and RSS. Here’s a list of how libraries use RSS, as suggested by the presenters:
- Library news
- Subject blogs or subject guides
- New acquisitions by subject
- Book reviews
- Catalog search queries
- Personalized circulation information
- Academic blogs
- Internal communication
- Subject list of selected RSS feeds
And here’s a list of how RSS can be used in the serials world:
- Conference blogs
- Journal table of contents
- Journals with RSS feeds on library websites
- New electronic journal titles
- Recent serial issues received
- Database search queries
Most of these ideas have been kicked around in the library blogging community, but for many of the session attendees, RSS was a new and brilliant concept for getting customized information out to our users.
The presenters also had ideas for RSS within the serials community that included ejournal package/collection updates from publishers, and a closer-to-home suggestion that the NASIG jobs web listings have an associated RSS feed. I’m working on that one in my new capacity as webspinner, but it hasn’t been easy to get it just the way I want it. If anyone out there knows of a (preferably free or low-cost) blog software that allows you to create categories and will run on a Windows server, please let me know. Right now Blogger isn’t cutting it for what we need to do with the jobs list.
