Tales of a Librarian

Hi there, it seems it has almost been a week since my last post - that would have been unheard of back in January when I started the blog so I hope that I am not falling into the track of gradually forgetting about it, as I still think it is a really great way to put all my thoughts about my work and stuff together in one place.

I have been adding to my list of rss feeds almost daily - there always seems to be new ones i have not heard of popping up in various posts. The best ones I have recently discovered so far include Caveat Lector and Info Career Trends. The former is written by one librarian/information professional/self-confessed geek about various aspects of her work - it’s really interesting and her writing style is very entertaining! Indeed, her post on Google books was unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else (in a good way, of course!). The latter feed is from an online journal which publishes relatively short articles by practicing librarian on a whole host of career related issues. One particular post that caught my attention was written by a librarian who used to be a bookseller, and she was discussing the various positive influences that the retail service side of her previous job had upon her work as a librarian (see ‘Confessions of a Reformed Bookseller‘). All very relevant and interesting stuff.

Walt Crawford released the March edition of his Cites and Insights online journal, in which the main article was a piece discussing the notion of ‘folksonomies’ and whether they should be used in place of tradition cataloguing (OR) or along side (AND). He of course, was fighting the corner of the AND people, which is something that I also agree with. I quite enjoy putting my own invented tags on things like these blog entries, technorati and del.icio.us but it is constantly on my mind to make them relevant, accurate descriptions and to try and be consistent throughout. Scanning various people’s tags on del.icio.us shows that most people generally just use a tag once, and they are highly personal and there is no linking related terms in any way. It’s just no use for proper searching and retrieval. But for fun, for sharing and so forth, well, I’m confident that it is fairly acceptable (although work to improve it wouldn’t go amiss). You can’t really imagine someone sitting down with AACR2 guidelines to fully catalogue their bookmarks can you? Bit too much effort, even for me and I LOVE to organise things… The paper is well worth a read. And Mr Crawford also makes reference to another paper discussing the whole folksomony debate from Guy and Tonkin (2005) ‘Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags‘, in DLib Magazine, which is also worth a read.

Technorati Tags: blogs, rss, folksonomies

The Spoken Word Matters blog yesterday pointed to the University of Liverpool library webpages, which is advising students of the benefits of subscribing to rss feeds of table of contents of their favourite journals (see page). They also provide information on installing an rss reader and a list of journals that currently have rss feeds. This is very similar in to the JISC-funded TOCRoSS project that I discussed last week (see post), however, in this instance the library itself does not appear to have been involved in the development of the feeds, simply the sourcing of those which are available and the promotion of the benefits of these to students. This will no doubt become increasingly useful as more and more ejournals distribute their ToCs by RSS. Currently I have only found one ‘academic’ publication (i.e. those expensive peer-reviewed ones!!) to which I have access that allows RSS feeds (the Journal of Information Science) and a couple of other electronic-only publications such as Ariadne and D-Lib magazine. I’m sure, however, that eventually, organisations such as Emerald etc. will develop RSS feeds as part of their subscription service for all their publications (eventually!). In the meantime, I think that the way in which the University of Liverpool is utlising the facilities that are already on offer and promoting them to students in this way is a really effective (and cost-effective!) method of increasing the usability and accessibility of their electronic collection.

Technorati Tags: rss, cataloguing, catalogues, table of contents, library, opac

Funny how I was mentioning incorporating more information into library catalogues for users (see post), as today I came across a post from the panlibus blog discussing a new JISC funded project called TOCRoSS (table of contents by really simple syndication), which is a new ten month joint project between Emerald, the University of Derby and Talis.

It aims to develop an RSS news feed service that automatically pushes publisher and e-journal information to into catalogues.

The press release states that “With TOCRoSS in place, e-journal table of content data will be fed automatically into library catalogues without the need for cataloguing, classification or data entry. This will improve the accuracy of records, save time for library staff, and deliver a more integrated OPAC experience to library users. It will be of particular value to academic libraries where students often choose search engines such as Google over the library catalogue and the myriad of databases for tracking down articles and information”

Paul Evans, from Emerald publishing, is quoted as saying “Cataloguing journals and articles has, up until now, been considered a ‘luxury’ in resource terms by many academic institutions. Once TOCRoSS is complete, cataloguing journal articles becomes automatic and the commonly asked question ‘Why can’t I find any articles on the OPAC?’ becomes obsolete.”

Similiarly, Richard Wallis of Talis comments “RSS has, up until now, been used to deliver news-feeds or alerts of blog postings to individual’s desktops. This simple, yet powerful technology has many potential applications for machine to machine communications. TOCRoSS will demonstrate how the innovative application of simple technologies enables the delivery of services that previously would not have been viable”

It’s really a very exciting prospect, I can remember very well the problems concerning the integration of electronic journals, articles, databases and the library catalogue at my last university. I feel this project will prove to be a real step forward in providing users with a great way to access all of the library’s services from a single point of access - quick, efficient, and enhancing retreival. As they also point out it will encourage students to access these journals, which as I remember, I only really did for the first time in the final year of my undergrad course. I think that making these more accessible and easily searchable will no doubt increase their usage and students’ awareness of them also. I wait with baited breath for the next update on the project…

You can also read about the main aims, objectives and outcomes of the project on the JISC website.

Reading Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog and I came across an interesting post about a pdf presentation by Geoff Harder about RSS feeds/readers.

It’s really interesting, particularly his description of NADD (Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder) and RII (Repetitive Information Injury). I’m sure there are a few of us who identify with these conditions!! I spend a lot of time looking through my rss feeds in newsgator - Lorcan himself reports subscribing to around 150 feeds - and admits that it is impossible to keep up with them all. I myself currently subscribe to around 25, which seems piddly in comparison - and even then I feel hard pushed to read everything that comes through it.

Anyways, both the post and the presentation are well worth a nosy…