I have used RSS feeds before, having set myself up a Google Reader account a few months ago. This was mostly to scan for stories about libraries in the news and following interesting librarian blogs before my library school interviews so that I could keep an eye on any news stories they might ask me about.
I particularly liked the way you could make an RSS feed of keyword searches on the BBC news website, which is a brilliantly lazy way of looking out for interesting news stories. I love that little orange square! Although when I went to have a play for 23 Things I noticed that the BBC search doesn't support this any more. If there are any wonderfully teccy people who know how to save keyword searches on sites that don't have the magic orange square I'd be really pleased to know about it.
Since going to my interviews I have to say that I haven't looked at Reader that often. I find that it is easy to organise different feeds and look at the ones of interest on Google Reader so I can just dip in and out. I was excited that I could subscribe to all of the Cambridge 23 Things blogs at once though - thanks to Girl in the Moon! I really like being able to scan all the blogs and being able to see which ones I have looked at although I'm unfortunately not going to have anywhere near enough time to read them all properly!
My instinct is that RSS feeds could be usefully utilised within libraries, in certain situations. I like the feature to be able to create a feed and then share it with others - this could be of use for collecting relevant feeds together for researchers, although obviously they would have to happy to get a RSS reader (or iGoogle or similar of course) themselves. It is essentially a very logical way of collecting together information which will be of use and/or interest on the net. This won't replace actively searching for information, or browsing, which can throw up unexpected items of interest, but is a useful addition to other research methods.
No comments:
Post a Comment