From the Director's DeskOctober 7, 2008 |
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Web 2.0 - RSS is News Brought to You!Our September stop on the Web 2.0 road was an OPAL session titled “Is Facebook for your Library” by Joe Hardenbrook from Staley Library, Millikin University. If you missed his session it is archived for you to view through OPAL. In October, our Web 2.0 path leads to RSS feeds. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. What RSS does is allows you to have information from websites, blogs, and other internet sites come to one location for you to view. To start, you need to set up an aggregator or a place for your RSS feeds to be located. There are many aggregators out there to choose from. Want to learn about RSS in less than 5 minutes? Lee LeFever has an excellent YouTube video, which makes RSS really simple. I have personally set up RSS feeds using Google Reader. If you have a Google account, you already have access to their reader. If you do not have an account you may want to set one up and be sure to signup for RSS feeds from L2, Library Learning, so that you can get feeds about RPLS CE events as we add them to the statewide CE calendar. Here at RPLS we use the Google Calendar to schedule our meetings, and availability. All staff have access and can see who is working or available at any time. It was easy to set up the feeds. I have feeds from the BBC, Unshelved, and Lorcan Dempsey’s Blog. I started small and will add feeds as I find sites or blogs that I want to keep track of. For a list of feeds, try the RSS Compendium. Note: I found the two links I mentioned above in a new book from the RPLS professional collection titled “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms” 2nd ed. by Will Richardson. On a lighter note, at the Illinois Library Association, there was an event titled “Style from the Stacks.” Several people were taking pictures and have mounted them on flickr. To see the designs, visit these sites. Rolling Prairie Library System |
