Information and the Future

This is the blog of the Information and the Future task force of the Rolfing Library at Trinity International University. The IF task force exists to explore the role of libraries in the future of Christian higher education.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

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.

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