Libraries and RSS

Why should libraries care about RSS?

Last week’s exercise of following eight library blogs via RSS feed really opened my eyes to the benefits of using RSS. I had previously been dismissive of the idea of subscribing the feeds via RSS when I first learned about this tool a few years ago. As Meredith Farkas states, “RSS is a great way to keep current with your favorite blogs, journals, and news sites, consolidating all your online reading in a single place” (Farkas, 2007).

RSS can be extremely useful in libraries and for librarians. Librarians can subscribe to RSS feeds to keep track of blogs and websites for their own interest, or to use as a resource guide for their patrons. RSS can also be enabled in various areas of the library’s website so that patrons can subscribe to RSS feeds on upcoming events, library news, and new titles in the collection. At some libraries, patrons can also subscribe to feeds for a particular search, or for updates on their library account. Additionally, some electronic database vendors are offering the option to subscribe to RSS feeds of searches on the database, including subject searches or a feed of articles from a specific journal.

Seeing as how I’ve only scratched the surface of using RSS with my free and easy Google Reader, it is mind-blowing and certainly overwhelming to learn how many different uses there are for this tool. Librarians who want to keep abreast of current technology tools and trends can certainly benefit from using RSS.

Farkas, M. (2007). Social Software In Libraries. Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Blogging in this class

How do you think blogging will contribute to your learning in this class?

I have been fascinated with blogs and blogging for years and find them a creative way for just about anyone to express themselves. They provide an outlet for people to express opinions or share experiences. I’ve had a plan to start a music blog for years but haven’t been able to get it going (largely due to being in grad school!). This class is enabling me to learn the basics about blogging and get some hands-on experience writing blog posts. This will naturally help me in the future as a librarian. Library blogs are becoming much more common in public and academic libraries. The San Francisco Public Library maintains 22 blogs systemwide. In the preservation department where I work, we have discussed the idea of starting and maintaining a preservation blog and what we would post about, but it has yet to take off beyond the discussion stage. We talked about posting how-to articles about preservation treatments that we do, including pictures and maybe even embedded video. Maintaining a blog for this class is certainly a motivator in getting me interested in taking the idea of the preservation blog beyond merely the “discussion stage”.

Subscribing to eight blogs

I really enjoyed subscribing to and reading posts from the five blogs in this assignment. While they are all from a librarian’s point of view, there are distinct differences in the approach each blog follows. They are all generally written from a personal perspective, but one of them seems to be more formal in its writing than the others. In the Library with a Lead Pipe is a collaborative blog that has several bloggers and guest writers, and the writing is lengthy and reads more like academic papers with cited articles appearing at the end of each post. While the topics can be interesting, including lengthy pieces on Facebook and WikiLeaks, it is a blog that requires more investment of time to delve through the postings one at a time. 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, The Distant Librarian contains posts that are short, to the point, and very casual in their writing. Paul Pival is the sole blogger and his blog contains mainly short book reviews, and blurbs about the electronic side of librarianship such as screencasting, electronic databases, and e-books. Librarian By Day also contains posts from a sole blogger (Bobbi Newman) about the tech side of libraries, but her posts seem to be more fleshed out and contain numerous links to other articles, plus embedded videos and images that make the posts more interesting. 

The blog David Lee King is run by a librarian who posts frequently and about many different topics related to librarianship. His “Top 10 Tips To Do Presentations Like Me” is an interesting series that every librarian or librarian-to-be can learn a thing or two from. It takes a certain boldness or chutzpah to name a blog after yourself and display images of yourself on your blog, but in Mr. King’s case it comes across as more gregarious than arrogant. And after I read on his blog that he is also a musician, his outgoing approach to blogging makes more sense.

My favorite blog of the five is The Librarian’s Commute by Olivia Nellums. Her topics are all over the map, including writing about patrons, weeding, e-books, blogging, among many others. It’s not too tech-heavy, which appeals to me since I’m not a super techy person. And the simplicity with how she lays out her posts with bullets or numbers to indicate her talking points and examples is a plus. I will certainly continue to read the other four blogs but I will probably navigate over to The Librarian’s Commute more often.

The three additional blogs I subscribed to are Genre X from the Oak Park Public Library, Marin County Free Library, and Shelf Talk from Seattle Public Library.  Genre X is a blog whose subtitle is “A Twenties and Thirties Book Group”. I am no longer in my twenties or thirties but I thought I’d peek in on what the blogging staff at OPPL was recommending to readers of that age group. The blog contains mostly readers’ advisory recommendations and announcements of events that would appeal to their designated demographic, such as trivia night, holiday book swap, and a Guitar Hero competition (all great ideas, in my opinion). Marin County Free Library’s blog has more general information and announcements, such as a new Overdrive app for eBooks and audiobooks on the iPad, tax help, audiobook download of the week, and upcoming events. It’s very simply laid out with a Blogger template and very easy to read. I’ve scanned Shelf Talk years ago and I seem to recall its being mostly book reviews, but they have expanded the scope of their blog and provide information about digital downloads, movie reviews, a Question of the Month series in which the tackle a reference question and answer it, as well as the informative book reviews. 

Of the blogs that I chose to subscribe to, the ones that I found to be successful had a simple layout that was not too busy on the page, were frequently updated, expressed a personal “voice” to the writing (i.e., informal) and were not too tech-oriented. There were certain blogs that were more tech-y than others, but I found the blogs that described the technical stuff in layman’s terms were more effective.

Credo Mobile

What organization do you find inspirational in their use of social media and why?

One organization that I find inspirational in their use of social media is a company called Credo Mobile. They are a mobile phone company (formerly called Working Assets) that champions progressive causes and donates a portion of their earnings to, in their words, “social change nonprofit groups.” They are a company that is not afraid to wear their political beliefs on their sleeves and that’s part of why the company exists is to provide an alternative mobile phone company (and long distance company if people still use land lines) that one can support if one believes in the causes they champion.

Credo Mobile’s Facebook page is very active, and contains numerous posts and links to articles about what is happening in politics on a given day. Of course, these are all from the progressive point of view. A scan of recent posts on the page reveal links to an article critical of GOP members who voted to repeal health care reform, an article about the House failing to extend the Patriot Act, and an AP story that reveal President Obama has kicked his smoking habit. But what is most interesting is that there is nary a post about the company itself or newsworthy posts about what is happening in the world of Credo. They have essentially taken their Facebook page to use as an individual would use his/her own Facebook page to share articles that one finds interesting.

Credo Mobile has 53,911 fans on their Facebook page, and they provide links to the causes they support in the “Favorite Pages”, such as Planned Parenthood, Doctors Without Borders, and Amnesty International. They do have a tab called “Mobile Offers” that provides information on their mobile phone plans. But I really do admire how they take a “politics and social causes first” approach to utilizing social media. Credo Mobile also has a Twitter account, but it appears to be less active. The latest tweet was sent January 19^th.

Excercise 1: Tesla Motors

I chose to study Tesla Motors since it’s a local Bay Area company that I admire and I have a friend who works for them. As you may already know, Tesla Motors is a Palo Alto-based startup that designs and manufactures electric cars. Their first model was a two-seat sports car called the Tesla Roadster. Their follow-up will be the Model S four-door sedan, which will be available in 2012. While I have little hope of owning either of these cars anytime soon, I admire that they are a small auto company that is influencing the major auto companies to steer towards producing more electric and hybrid-electric vehicles.

A Google search of “Tesla Motors” produced many positive articles about the company from auto and technology blogs, as well as the New York Times. An article from Bizjournal posted today that shares of Tesla’s stock rose 8 percent. By the second and third Google pages I started seeing less positive articles, one about the small plane crash that killed several Tesla employees in February 2010, and a business investment article about how Tesla is still a very long way from turning a profit.

Using How Sociable, Tesla Motors’ visibility score was only a 225, which is relatively low compared to companies like Subaru (1202) and Honda (3421). Additionally, Technorati only produced 24 blog posts relating to Tesla Motors. Social Mention gives a sentiment ratio of 8:1, with the overwhelming majority of mentions (458 posts/tweets) having a neutral sentiment.

Tesla has three different Yelp pages and there are a total of 30 reviews from Yelpers on those pages combined. All of the ratings were either 4 or 5 stars (aside from two skeptics) but I had a hard time finding someone who actually owned one of their vehicles. Most of the reviews were similar to myself in their enthusiasm about the product from a distance, though only a few had actually test-driven one.

Tesla’s Facebook page has 26,645 fans and their Wall is filled with people postings pictures, links and mentions of Tesla, including one person’s status update: “I'm a little disappointed there wasn't a Tesla Motors commercial during the Super bowl yesterday. There were way too many GM ads...” It seems natural that a company’s Facebook page will accumulate more positive feedback than negative since the postings are from so-called “fans” but it that has not always been the case with every business that opens up their online presence to allow customer feedback.

 

Tesla Motors is very active in using social media to get the word out about their product. I didn’t notice them responding very often to people who are talking about them online. In a few cases they “like”d what someone posted on their wall, and they have retweeted tweets that they considered worth informing the public about on Twitter. But for the most part, Tesla seems content on touting their product through tweets, Facebook posts, a Vimeo page, and their own blog on their website. They are a relatively new company that doesn’t have a large share of people who actually use their product; they only recently reached the 1,500 mark of Tesla Roadsters sold. They are more or less riding high on the love people have for sports cars and/or (the concept of) electric vehicles or both. In many ways, they are still in their “buzz” stage since there are more people that know about the product than actually use the product. Because of this there is not as much of a need to actively engage their customers online. However, there may come a time when Tesla is not feeling the “love” as fervently from the public as they currently are, and it would behoove them to utilize their social media tools (Twitter, Facebook) to build connections with the public more directly and give back some of the “love”.

The Concept of Library 2.0

I really like Sarah Houghton’s definition of Library 2.0, especially “more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs.” I also recognize how important it is to, as she describes, “get people back into the library by making the library relevant to what they want and need in their daily lives.” I have countless friends and acquaintances that simply don’t make use of their local libraries. When I talk to them about it, they say agreeably, “yeah, I should check it out.”

To me, Library 2.0 has a lot to do with making the library more interactive and opening it up to ideas that haven’t been done before. Like the blyberg.net article says, “L2 challenges library orthodoxy on almost every level.” By opening up a library’s website to comments, feedback, ratings, and reviews, providing downloadable materials from the comfort of one’s home, providing a gaming night in an allocated space in the library, and reaching out to tech savvy users via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as blogs, Library 2.0 concepts are increasingly becoming more common in libraries. And while the argument exists that much of the technology is costly, many of these features that are available are absolutely cost-free.

If there is proof that the concept of Library 2.0 is increasing, it is evident in the location where I work. I handle bindery shipments of periodicals that are bound into volumes and shelved in the Main Library for users to peruse. Every year an increasing number of periodicals are being canceled (subscriptions for physical copies) in favor of online databases that provide electronic versions of the same periodicals, which can then be accessed remotely by users from their homes or library computers. In this sense, the library is fulfilling a need for access to library materials from outside the library. Sure, there will still be users who come into the library to read the physical copies of newspapers and magazines, but this service of providing remote access to materials is another way of recognizing “community needs.”