RSS and all that

I found the readings this week straightforward. I picked up a few interesting tidbits. For example, Bloglines includes the option of creating an email subscription as a way of managing your mailing lists and other sites that have no RSS feeds, while keeping the information out of your regular email inbox (Reichart).

I was interested in the U. of Alberta libraries’ plans to target grad students and faculty with current awareness feeds. In my summer co-op position I witness a taste of reality that bars taking advantage of RSS feeds. It’s called restricted bandwidth. Although there are feeds available from many periodicals that would be of interest to the researchers serviced by the library, the researchers are not allowed to access these feeds at work. Instead, the library staff provide a current awareness service by scanning the periodicals and emailing the researchers any URLs for articles relevant to their fields. The library also sets up an automatically emailed current awareness service for researchers, using various databases—with searches are set up to be very closely tailored to the researcher’s needs. I was also interested in the U. of A.’s suggestion of RSS feeds for collection development and cataloguing. I can only speculate that these feeds would be for library staff use—perhaps incoming announcements from publishers about new titles; copy cataloguing information from other libraries?

It is interesting to wonder whether students will pay attention to feeds about library instruction. Would these feeds deliver small pieces of information broken down into disconnected pieces, or would they deliver complete lessons?

RSS feeds are great for alerts; but do they quickly become too busy so that the receiver no longers pays attention to them much the problem with an overcrowded inbox on the email account?

Hollenback’s description of how the use of networking aspects of Friendster and Orkut along with Flickr will show you your contacts’ photos as they post them (e.g., from a cameraphone) frankly makes me cringe. I suppose a public library could use this feature for a teen blog. Yes, it is wonderful technology, but I it makes me want to go into a quiet place, away from all this cyber-crowding, just so that I can talk to a person face to face. I feel all this incoming information is crowding out our time, our cyberspace, our lives. I think we need to use these resources with a lot more care—use them to improve the quality of what we do, but not just to jump on a new bandwagon. I like Winship’s comment that identifying blogs of value is hard because the proportion of serious ones is low! I haven’t got time to wade through all the junk. Am I suffering from information overload?