NSLS workshop on blogging

This morning I went to an NSLS workshop on blogging. It was great - I came away with some good ideas for how blogging and other new interactive technology could be used in the library. The presenter (Jenny Levine) put her slides online:
http://theshiftedlibrarian.com/presentations/2006/20060906NSLS.pdf

Here are some of the ideas I found most interesting:
- Use a blog for "what's new." It's quicker and easier to update than a traditional web page, since it does all the formatting and archiving automatically.
- Open up a blog to allow comments from patrons, encourage discussion and complaints. Let them say what they want to talk about.
- Make the catalog a blog and have comments from patrons on a book's usefulness.
- Have blogs for different subject areas with books, news and useful things for that discipline.
- Using RSS feeds, you can automatically pull information onto your website, such as news headlines, new books, and articles.
- It's possible to create a new books page using RSS feeds to automatically pull new items from the catalog.
- Some databases now allow you to use RSS to pull new articles. We could put new articles on subject guide pages.
- Library Success: a Best Practices Wiki was recommended to see what other libraries are doing:
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
- Do instant messaging for reference. The younger generation prefers instant messaging to email.
- All of this is free! It only requires staff time.