RSS Readers

If you are like me then you are never going to remember to go online and check blogs such as this one. An RSS Reader (aka RSS aggregator) is a tool that checks blogs, podcasts, and other websites with an RSS feed or its equivalent. Many websites that frequently update their content now include such a feed. Above is a screen shot of my RSS Reader.

On the left is a list of "channels" ie blogs that I want to track. Bold lines indicate blogs with new content that I haven't read. The middle column show the most recent posts from the blog that is selected (in this case the "It's all good" blog from OCLC) and on the right is the unread posts from that blog. I can also mark posts that I wish to return to and move individual posts into a "my stuff" bin to review later.

I got this software from www.feeddemon.com. There are many different readers available, some are free although feeddemon is not. I chose it b/c I found a library website where they reccomended it. If anyone has experimented with other readers I would be interested in your experiences.

I'm still trying to figure out how much time one ought to spend reading blogs, like email lists they can take a lot of time, but I have found that my RSS reader has helped me read blogs more effeciently and of course like listserves you don't have to read everything!

In a future post I'll list some of the library blogs I have found helpful. There are also several theological blogs in existence some by reputable scholars and publications. This may be a type of information that we want to think about making our library patrons aware of and helping them to access.