Brainstorming...
I think Rebecca brings up a lot of interesting ideas in her post yesterday. I'm especially intrigued by the following:
"Have blogs for different subject areas with books, news and useful things for that discipline."
I think that this idea has a lot of potential. Especially if we were able to include information that was not readily available in the Catalog or other sources such as our own reviews or links to reviews and biographical information on the author. We may also be able to tailor information to specific classes that are meeting or assignments that have been given. If we want patrons to see us as a valuable resource, maybe we can be more aggressive in giving them valuable information. We might also think through ways we could partner with the faculty in providing assistance to both the faculty and the students in their class.
One potential hurdle to what Rebecca was talking about is the number of people who have no idea what RSS feeds are. However, I think that the MyTrinity portal has the capability to recieve and display feeds. The first time I logged on, I was recieving the RSS feed from Slate.com though that seems to have been removed from my MyTrinity. So we may be able to leverage the new web software to make this stuff available.
Like Rebecca said, there is a lot we can do if we are willing to invest staff time and effort to learn how.
"Have blogs for different subject areas with books, news and useful things for that discipline."
I think that this idea has a lot of potential. Especially if we were able to include information that was not readily available in the Catalog or other sources such as our own reviews or links to reviews and biographical information on the author. We may also be able to tailor information to specific classes that are meeting or assignments that have been given. If we want patrons to see us as a valuable resource, maybe we can be more aggressive in giving them valuable information. We might also think through ways we could partner with the faculty in providing assistance to both the faculty and the students in their class.
One potential hurdle to what Rebecca was talking about is the number of people who have no idea what RSS feeds are. However, I think that the MyTrinity portal has the capability to recieve and display feeds. The first time I logged on, I was recieving the RSS feed from Slate.com though that seems to have been removed from my MyTrinity. So we may be able to leverage the new web software to make this stuff available.
Like Rebecca said, there is a lot we can do if we are willing to invest staff time and effort to learn how.
posted by Matt @ 1:34 PM
2 Comments:
At 11:28 AM,
Rebecca said…
Yes - I didn't quite understand how it all worked, but it sounded like RSS feeds could be used to pull information from different sources into a webpage. So for example, you could create a webpage for politics that would pull books on that topic from the catalog, the latest articles from databases, and news items from an online newspaper. The webpage you created would then display titles and links to the full information. And the page would automatically update with new information.
At 9:11 AM,
Rebecca said…
I just discovered a site which has examples of libraries who are using RSS feeds in different ways:
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/RSS.htm
This could be a good site to get ideas and to see how to implement them.
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