Digitalist life in the library

28Jul/105

Please update your feed

I'm taking a quick blogging break from Library Day in the Life to beg a favour from you.

I have just put the RSS feed for this blog through Feedburner. If you are an exisiting subscriber could you please update your feed to this brand spanking new one. It will take just 1 minute of your time.

Why I didn't do it when I moved from WordPress.com to WordPress.org I do not know, it would have made life a whole lot easier.

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22Feb/100

Things 5 & 6 – RSS feeds

  • Thing 5: Sign up to Google Reader and subscribe to the RSS feed of the 23 Things blog.
  • Thing 6: Find some more feeds to subscribe to.

I honestly do not know how I would survive without RSS feeds. I must have been using them now for around 3 years and in my mind Google Reader is the only way to manage them. At present I have 204 subscriptions - at least half of those are for the blogs of the 23 Things participants, and yes I am reading them all.

I've seen a lot of posts on the 23 Things blogs that show the participants can really see the benefit of getting all the updates from favourite website and blogs in one place but there is an expression of concern about how on earth it's possible to keep up with it all. My advice to you is to organise and prioritise. Organise your subscriptions into folders based on topic to start with and if you're really keen you can then add numbers to set their priority e.g. 1 = must read, 10 = if I don't get around to this it's not the end of the world.

My next tip is to set aside a period of time each day that you will use to catch up on your feeds. I have a quick dip in first thing to zip through those feeds that update multiple times a day (e.g. Mashable and LOLcats) and then take around 30 minutes at lunch to read through the less frequent updaters with a bit more care.

Finally, don't be afraid to use the sacred "Mark all as read" button. Having just returned from a week's holiday I have used this on 6/9 of my folders cutting my unread items from around 400 to nearer 150.

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22Dec/099

Top 10 Library Related Blogs

I have 43 subscriptions in my "Information + Libraries" folder in GoogleReader. Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about dropping a few as I am finding that more and more the unread items are building up. I'm sure I can cut it down simply by taking out a few that are no longer being updated but that doesn't sort out the mountain of unread items. So the actual number of subscriptions doesn't matter it's the frequency at which they are updated. Should I then just drop the prolific authors? Surely not if the content they're posting is relevant and interesting. It's clear I'm going to have to find some other way of identifying which feeds to keep.

There are two ways I could approach this

  1. I could create a wonderful algorithm that takes into account the frequency of posts, their relevance, how often I skip over them, link through to them, mark them as favourites or to read later.
  2. I could get drastic and say if I were forced at gunpoint to choose just ten, which would I keep?

You've guessed it, I'm going for the latter. These blogs made the list because they are consistently entertaining, informative and inspiring. Without further ado here they are:

  • In the Library with the Lead Pipe - a group blog discussing issues that impact academic, public and school libraries.
  • Info-mational - written by Char Booth, E-Learning Librarian at UC Berkeley.
  • Information Tyrannosaur - written by Andy Burkhardt, Emerging Technologies Librarian at Champlain College.
  • Joeyanne Libraryanne - written by Jo Alcock, Resources Librarian at the University of Wolverhampton and current ILS student.
  • Librarian by Day - written by Bobbi Newman, transliteracy guru.
  • Librarians on the Loose - written by Emma Illingworth and Sarah Ison, librarians at the University of Brighton.
  • Library Bazaar - written by Fiacre O’Duinn, a librarian in Hamilton, Ontario.
  • Libreaction - written by Andy Priestner, Head Librarian at Judge Business School.
  • Organising Chaos - written by Laura, aka Woodsiegirl, law librarian and current ILS student.
  • Swiss Army Librarian - written by Brian Herzog, a reference librarian at Chelmsford Public Library, Chelmsford MA.
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