In just the past few weeks, I’ve received two emails from companies whose services I’ve tried out who are now shutting their doors. Another one is changing its focus and will no longer be hosting the very thing I was using it for. Luckily these were tools/services that I’d tried out but wasn’t dependent on for providing services to my patrons. But what if I had been dependent? Would I have been able to move my content easily to another provider? Would I have had to find a way to host the content myself? Or would the content have simply gone up in smoke with no way to ever get it back?

While going with hosted solutions for one’s 2.0 services is cheap or free and is often the only option for a library with a tight budget, it’s not always the prudent way to go. Even if the service is free, the time library staff spend creating content on that service isn’t, and we don’t want all that effort (and content) going down the drain. We often put way too much trust in many of these services, having no backups for the content we’re putting on their servers. One great example of what can happen when you trust a company too much is Ma.gnolia, which was a very popular social bookmarking company that had a catastrophic server failure in January and lost everyone’s data. While they tried to restore the database, they failed, and now they’re going to start from scratch (though I can’t imagine who would trust them with their bookmarks now!). I don’t know if Ma.gnolia allowed people to back up their own bookmarks to their hard drive, but even if they did, I’d wager that a lot of people rarely, if ever, remembered to do it (she writes sheepishly, wondering when the last time was that she backed up her own del.icio.us bookmarks — done!).

My friend Stephen Francoeur created two of the best 2.0 tools for library staff that I’m aware of — an active and useful reference blog and reference wiki. For these tools which he created four years ago or so, he used Blogger and PBWiki. The blog and wiki are vital to their reference staff since they contain so much staff knowledge collected over many years. In his most recent blog post, Stephen describes how he decided that home is the safest place for all that data and how he had to move the blog from Blogger to a locally hosted version of Wordpress MU, and the wiki from PBWiki (now PBWorks) to a locally installed version of Confluence. He discussed how difficult the transition was, especially with the wiki since he had to literally copy and paste the content from the old wiki into the new. Had either of these companies gone bust before they could move that content to a local server, it might possibly have been gone forever. This just highlighted again to me how important it is that we gauge how vital the things we’ve created with these 2.0 tools are to our library (or to us personally if we use them outside of work) and take steps to protect that content or functionality accordingly. If the Google Custom Searches that I’ve created for several subject areas were to disappear, it wouldn’t be a grave tragedy. Were our subject guide wiki to disappear, we’d have lost content that is vital to our students and faculty and took us years to develop. That’s why our subject guide wiki lives on our own server.

We utilize the services of so many of these 2.0 companies because they provide services and space for free. However those services cost someone money, and if they aren’t making enough from pro accounts or ads, then they’re losing money on the bandwidth and server space it costs to run a successful site. Many of these companies lack any sort of a revenue model and while they may be funded by venture capitalists or big companies like Google and Yahoo! now, they may not be forever if they can’t find a way to make money for their benefactors. It scares me how dependent Iranians are on Twitter to get the word out about what the government is doing there when the company is losing money hand over fist. And many of the other big 2.0 companies we know and love are in the same boat.

There’s also the issue of their infrastructure. When I put things on our library’s server, I know that there are daily backups of the content. So if something goes kablooey, I can always roll it back to what it looked like the previous day. Not too bad. But do we know much about the server infrastructure of the companies we’re dependent on? Often we don’t know anything because that information isn’t provided to us. And this can even be a problem when you’re paying a company to run a service for you. Our Voyager ILS installation is hosted by Ex Libris, and a year or two ago they had too high a load on their servers and, as a result, we had a lot of problems with Voyager going down for a few months. It’s important, whether we’re paying or not, that when we’re trusting a mission critical service to a third party we know about their server infrastructure.

Another big issue is when a company decides to suddenly change how it operates, which may leave you high and dry or might at least force you to change the way you operate. A great case in point is PBWiki, now known as PBWorks. I really thought a great deal of PBWiki early on, so much so that I was on their Educational Advisory Board. Then they managed to alienate much of their original fanbase, me included. First they created a new version of their wiki software (PBWiki 2.0) which completely changed the way that authentication into the wiki worked. But you still had the choice of whether or not you wanted to create a 1.0 or 2.0 wiki. And in spite of a huge wave of negative feedback they received about PBWiki 2.0, they not only kept it the way it was, but forced people to switch their original PBWikis to 2.0. Now, they’re called PBWorks and I have no idea if the wikis (or workspaces) still look the same as the 2.0 wiki, because I wouldn’t touch a PBWiki at this point with a 10-foot pole. I don’t like companies that don’t listen to their users.

I don’t have a good solution for what libraries should do if they can’t afford to host their own content (or if the only technology providing that functionality is externally hosted), but I do think it’s critical that we should think critically about these companies with which we’re entrusting our content and whether our content is safe enough relative to its value. While your Twitter posts may not be super-valuable to you later on, your del.icio.us bookmarks or blog posts probably are. If your content is important to your library, consider whether or not you think that service that’s hosting your content is stable. Who hosts your content? A large, stable company that is making enough to at least cover its expenses, a start-up with venture funding and no revenue model, or some individual for whom this service is a hobby (though they hope to sell it to Google one day — and btw, it’s scary that “selling to Google” seems to have become a revenue model in itself)? Can you easily back up that content? Can you easily move it to another service? And do other services exist that provide the same or similar functionality? And equally important, what claims do these companies make on your content (always read their Terms of Service!). We need to consider all these things because I’d hate to see the hard work of librarians go up in smoke because it didn’t occur to them that these free 2.0 services might not be here forever.

Have any of you had disasters with hosted services? Have you moved your stuff from a hosted service to your own server and why? What do you consider before you put content on some third party’s servers? Do you feel like the your content is safe in all of the 2.0 services you use online?

My little guy is sick of beating up the animals hanging from his activity gym and seems to want some cuddle time now. Talk amongst yourselves.

Free at last!

Now, if you all can just stop posting things for the next month or so, that would be great. K thx!

I’m not defending Kathleen Gilroy here. I think she and her organization are seeking to make money off a concept (Web 2.0) on which they seem to have little understanding. They are creating deeply flawed community platforms that don’t meet needs and feel rigidly structured from above (the polar opposite of what people want from 2.0 communities). I think her behavior in trying to silence bloggers who criticized her last project (ALA 2.0 Bootcamp) was reprehensible, and I think that may have been part of the cause of the sturm und drang. However, I feel like by having this open forum, she was at least trying to be more transparent and open to criticism. Hopefully, though, she at least took to heart some of the legitimate points that people were making about SWIFT. I don’t know that I would have if I were attacked in that way.

Kudos to Jane Dysart and Information Today for exploring new options for aggregating content and building community online. We shouldn’t discourage their experimentation in these areas, and I worry that might be the result of this whole affair. There may well be better ways of collaborating online around a conferencethan what we already do. Kathleen, sorry for the drubbing, but it really is a terrible product. I hope you’ve figured out that librarians are not a good market for your products/services. Or maybe we’re the perfect test audience since, if it can survive us, it must be a pretty darn good product. We’re like a wind tunnel or one of those crash-test machines. “Designed even to survive librarians!”

If nothing else, this SWIFT platform gave me some ideas for how to do some of what they were trying to do better. I’ve been looking for a way to aggregate all of the blog posts about a specific session together since I created the wiki for ALA Annual 2005. For Internet Librarian 2006, I created pages where people could post a link to their blog post about a specific session or write a report right on the wiki. That did not happen because it took effort on the part of the user. The Otter Group sought to solve this problem by having individual tags for each session. The likelihood of people actually using a session tag is slim-to-nil – it’s hard enough to get people to tag their posts CIL2008. But I had another idea while I was sitting in the session about SWIFT. What if I take the RSS feed that comes from the Technorati conference tag and filter it using Feed Digest or Yahoo! Pipes? I could filter it for each individual session and then would have feeds that contained just the posts from each individual session. I’d probably miss some posts because people would not put in the title of the session or would enter it differently, but it’s the best alternative I can think of. I could then use Grazr to create an interface where someone could click on a date, click on a track, click on a session, and see all the blog posts about that session (here’s a very rough version with posts that mention Pecha Kucha and CIL2008 or Computers in Libraries — there’s an RSS feed as well). I just did that in a few minutes using Feed Digest, Technorati, and Google Blog Search (to pick up stuff Technorati missed — like my own post!). It would be very time-consuming to set it up for every session, but it would certainly provide value without asking users to do anything differently. Do you think this would be useful? Are you happy enough with just seeing what Technorati pulls up under the conference tag? I’d love some feedback, because it would certainly not be worth the effort to do for future conferences if it doesn’t add much value.

When I see something done badly or stupidly, I don’t get mad. Well, maybe I do sometimes. But I also try and think of a better way of doing it. Five Weeks to a Social Library was my comment on the ALA 2.0 Bootcamp. See? This is how it’s done. We often can do this stuff better, because we have an understanding of the tools and the culture. How can we create better conference communities online? Ideas anyone?

I had a really wonderful time at Computers in Libraries, as always. While there are always certain talks where the delivery is disappointing or where you don’t learn anything, I went to a lot of talks that were fun or educational or both. And of course half of the learning goes on when you’re not even trying, during those networking times between sessions. I had a lot of fantastic conversations with people who have the similar professional interests. While we’re not always talking about libraries, we’re making valuable connections and friendships. Never underestimate the value of networking.

Here were some of the highlights for me:

• Going Local in the Library: Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Local 2.0 – What a great session to start my conference experience with! Charles Lyons gave us some great ideas for how libraries can help to collect and disseminate local information to patrons. He actually mentioned two “local wikis” created by libraries that I hadn’t heard of: LoudonPedia and WikiNorthia (I’m a huge fan of the SCRLD Wiki, which he also mentioned) I’ve been thinking about creating a Norwich University Wiki, where the library could gather information from all different groups on campus (students, faculty, staff) to create a truly helpful resource for new students. At the moment, I don’t have time to create, market or maintain this, but it’s definitely something I’d love to work on in the future. Lyons mentioned lots of other ways to get local, such as local search/custom search, blogs like Darien Community Matters, local online communities like Skokie Talk and MyHamilton.ca, and custom maps. I have firmly believed for a long time that the future of social software is local, and it’s nice to see libraries starting to move in that direction.
• The Global Librarian: Online Social Networks – definitely the funniest presentation at the conference. I didn’t learn much from Rikhei Harris, Josh Neff and Steve Lawson’s talk about the Library Society of the World, but I had a great time while not learning. I hope that some of the people who weren’t aware of some of the alternative professional networking opportunities online got something out of it. Any presentation involving a Rickroll, is a-ok with me. The second part of the session included three of the women involved in the excellent Infodoodads blog. I learned that collaborative blogging can make you pregnant (2 out of 3 of them are) and how to best manage and market a collaborative blog. Kate Gronemyer is definitely going on my awesome list. Anyone who shares Milano cookies and loves the Chowhound community is alright with me.
• Virtual Reference: Endless Possibilites – Two excellent and informative talks in one session on virtual reference. While I knew most of what he discussed, Dan Sich gave a really solid description of the efforts at his library to implement widgetized IM reference. It was nice to hear about the limitations of Hab.la, which I’d been interested in for our library, but am definitely not using until they allow you to put widgets on more than 5 web pages. Derik Badman’s discussion about how he created virtual reading rooms of the most recent journal tables of contents from specific disciplines was of great interest to me (here’s an example of what he did for library literature). I’ve been thinking of doing the same in some of the social science disciplines, taking feeds from the most popular journals and either mashing them up and turning them into one feed or putting them into something like Grazr to display them on a web page. It was good to hear from Derik that it was a really time-consuming project, so I’ll probably just start with one subject area and see how it goes. Derik used Yahoo! Pipes to accomplish his project, but I might use something more intuitive (for me) like Feed Digest.



Pecha Kucha Group

Originally uploaded by mcmikedermott

• 2.0 Pecha Kucha—Conversation Face-Off! – 6 presenters, 20 slides for 20 seconds each for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds per presenter. This was a real challenge for all of us, but it ended up being one of the most fun presentations I’ve ever been a part of. You can see good write-ups (a challenge in itself!) of the challenge at the Librarian in Black and Jenica Rogers-Urbanek. Greg Schwartz definitely had the most entertaining presentation (a library podcasting fable) and deserved the win. I’m just happy I remembered what I was going to say and got it out in 6 minutes 40! This is definitely something I’d like to try again and would like to see at other conferences. I’ve now given 3-hour, 2-hour, 1-hour, 30-minute, 15-minute, and 6 minute 40 second talks on wikis. What’s next?
• Collaborating with YouTubers to Enhance Library Instruction – I almost didn’t go to this one, and it ended up being one of the best. We’ve been thinking of doing some instructional videos at my library and this convinced me that involving students in it would be a very good idea. Check out Databases!, Chronicles of Libraria and more from Daabomb3018 (the college-aged son of the presenter from University of South Florida).
• Open Source Applications – another two-parter. I really liked Julian Clark’s presentation; the material wasn’t new to me, but it was an excellent introduction for people new to open source. Glen Horton gave a great talk on how librarians can give back to the open source community without necessarily knowing how to code. This includes teaching patrons about open source software, providing open source software on CD or thumb drives, writing documentation, and identifying bugs and reporting them.

I’ve been feeling a bit tired and run-down lately, so I wasn’t able to stay out as late as I usually do at these conferences, but it did result it my actually getting to the keynote presentations in the morning. I was very pleased that I made it to Liz Lawley’s keynote. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make library instruction more fun instead of making it feel like medicine students have to grudgingly take, and Liz really showed us how a “spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” (really!). More to the point, she showed us the elements of games that make them so satisfying and appealing to people and how those elements can be integrated into tasks people find boring/un-fun more satisfying. I am definitely going to look more into Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming (PMOG), Seriosity’s Attent, and Social Genius for ideas on how to turn basic tasks we do every day into a game. I do want to turn our library into a “happiness engine.”

I’m coming back to work tonight energized and excited about my new job and the possibility of implementing some of the things I heard about at CIL. Each of us is serving patrons in different ways (using different tools) and I love how conferences allow us to open up a little window into the work of these other libraries. Sometimes I look in and see that we’re doing the same thing. Sometimes I see tools and services that wouldn’t work in our library. But it’s those times I look in and see a fantastic new way of providing services that make me come back again and again to the Info Today conferences.

I think this is a common problem with open source projects and social software communities. Frequently the tools or communities so many of us depend on are run by one individual. And it’s usually fine until that person gets too busy to maintain it. I’ve had the same issue with the Library Success Wiki. While once in a blue moon, someone will pop in and fix some stuff on the wiki (people add to the wiki all the time, but I’m talking about the more maintenance-related tasks), I pretty much handle all of the maintenance. And that’s ok; it’s not particularly time-consuming to keep an eye on the Recent Changes feed each day and fix the errors of novice wiki editors. But I always wish I had more time to devote to it. I frequently get ideas for how to make the wiki better, but have no time really to make them happen. Anyone can pop into the wiki, create an account, and start implementing their own good ideas for making it better. I don’t have any more ownership over the wiki than you do; I just do the most basic wiki gardening. For all intents and purposes, this is an “open source community” which would benefit from the vision and effort of others. So if you’re perhaps not a coder but are looking for a social software project to contribute to, just pop over to the Library Success Wiki and think about what you might want to change/add. The beauty of a wiki is that your contribution can be as big or small as you want. You can add to an already-existing page, create a new page, or completely reorganize the wiki content.

Hopefully Feed2JS and the Library Success Wiki will continue to thrive and become far more than their creators had ever envisioned.

When our Coordinator of Public Services started a little over a year ago, she was really gung-ho about creating useful subject guides for our patrons. There were a few barriers though. The first was (or is) time. Each librarian is a liaison to a whole lot of programs. One person is liaison to “Social Sciences.” Another is liaison to “Humanities.” As Distance Learning Librarian, I am the liaison to 10 academic programs (from Masters in Business Administration to Masters in Civil Engineering to Masters in Nursing to Masters in Military History and more). I’m lucky, because I’d been creating subject guides for my programs over the past two years and have pretty well-developed ones already in use. My colleagues are starting from scratch with our on-campus students, so it’s a lot of work and for everyone, subject guides are more of a “when I have free time” sort of task. Were I running the show, I would probably set a deadline for when people had to be done with these, because otherwise, there are always more pressing things to do.

The second barrier was technology, which wasn’t really seen as much of a barrier by anyone but me. Currently, the way the website runs is that people give me content and I put it up online. This seems to me like a recipe for disaster with the subject guides. Sure, it’s not so hard to initially put some subject guides online, but what about when links change? Or when a database changes its URL and I have to make the change on 20 separate pages? I’d originally thought that we were just going to link to the relevant area on the “databases by subject” page, but the Public Services Coordinator wanted the individual databases to be explicitly linked to in each guide. I wanted to figure out a system where I wasn’t totally in control of maintaining the content, because it would be a full-time job in itself (and, as you can imagine, I do have a few other duties… just a few!).

So began my exploration of the options for low-threshold, sustainable subject guides. I say low-threshold because I’m not a coder. I can’t rig up some fancy ColdFusion CMS like the lovely Karen Coombs did at the University of Houston. The main goal for me was to have my colleagues be able to update as much of their own content as possible and to not have a situation where when a link changes, I will have to change it in a million places.

The first thing I thought of was using del.icio.us. On the companion website for my book, I have a dynamic list of relevant links for each chapter. These lists actually pull from the things I’ve bookmarked chapter1, chapter2, etc. in del.icio.us. It would certainly be easy for my colleagues to bookmark web content in del.icio.us and add an annotation. And it’s definitely easy also to display it on a website. del.icio.us has a took called link roll which will display a chosen portion of your links. It allows you to choose what tag(s) you want to display, how many you want to display, and how you want the list sorted (alphabetically or chronologically). It will then give you the JavaScript that will enable you to display it on your website. If you know anything about CSS, you can even style the output to look like the rest of your site.

del.icio.us would also work for the database lists. I could create a bookmark record for each database in our library (with the proxy prefix). I could then tag each of these databases with the names of the subjects they should be placed into (such as db_political_science, db_mathematics, etc.). That way, if the URL of a database changes, I would only have to make the change in one place in del.icio.us.

I actually got so far as training my colleagues on how to use del.icio.us before I changed my mind. The main reason I didn’t go with del.icio.us was because I didn’t want to be so dependent on a third-party vendor; especially one that we didn’t pay to provide the service. I know del.icio.us isn’t going anywhere, but it can and has gone down. When it does go down, lots of the content from our subject guides will inexplicably disappear. While I don’t imagine that disaster will strike del.icio.us and it will be put out of commission forever, I’d just hate to be that dependent on it. As bad a server administrator as I am, I’d rather have the data living on our server. Also, I’d still be responsible for maintaining the rest of the content on each subject guide (contact info, subject headings, book lists, journals, etc.), so it wasn’t a perfect solution for the whole site. Still, I think this would be a great option for many libraries, especially those who don’t have regular server access to update their web content.

Our Electronic Resources Librarian and I discussed LibGuides, but we knew that the library was not going to spend the money on it. I must admit that LibGuides is very cool, but we don’t currently need a lot of the features they offer. I like that they have a bookmarklet for web resources, that you can easy embed search tools (for catalog, databasese, etc.) and that you can easily display RSS feeds on the site. Usage stats are very nice too. The rest of the stuff is cool, but not really that important to us. I think it’s a great tool for larger libraries where there are lots of subject guides and lots of hands in those guides. For the number of subject guides we’d create at our little library with six liaisons contributing, we don’t need something we’d have to pay for. It’s also great for libraries that are integrated in social networking software or have blogs and websites they might want to embed subject guide content on. It’s cool, but not really something we need. For more views on LibGuides, check out reviews from the Academic Librarian, the Librarian in Black, and BiblioTechWeb.

Next, I started looking at open source options. There are plenty of libraries that have created their own homegrown systems for creating and maintaining subject guides. Some (like the one that Karen Coombs created at the University of Houston) are Cold Fusion-based and are not something one can easily just install and get going with. Others are much simpler. Some libraries/librarians have been kind enough to make the products of their labor open source.

Here were some of the tools I looked at that seemed at least remotely feasible for me to take on:

• Research Guide – From the University of Michigan. Wayne State also uses it. Looks good. Was updated in 2006. Was just concerned about how to set up the authentication stuff.
• LibData – from the University of Minnesota. Hasn’t been updated since 2003 or 2004. library is not using it anymore. (update: looks like they are still using it; not sure where I got the idea that they weren’t)
• Pirate Source – This one was developed at Eastern Carolina University, but is used at a bunch of libraries. The install script didn’t work so I had to create the tables and SQL queries manually. Had trouble trying to get it to work with PHP5. Not sure I like the initial page since people are inundated with choices and it may confuse some.
• Subjects Plus – my personal fave. This is an enhancement of Pirate Source developed by Ithaca College. It’s great-looking though it takes up a lot of screen real estate. In the sidebar you can put info about the liaison, links to tutorials, call numbers and syndicated news feeds. I love the “Try these First” feature since students usually just want to know what the very best resources are. I still don’t love the initial page where they choose the guide and then have the option to select the types of resources they are looking for. It’s good to give people options, but sometimes less is more, I think.

I was actually all set to go with Subjects Plus (which really does rock as far as subject guide software goes) and had it installed on our server, but then got cold feet. While it’s a great option now, will I (or my successor) be able to successfully maintain the software? These are all software projects developed by one or a few people. If these universities end up implementing another tool in the future, there probably won’t be continued development of the software (as was the case with LibData). For libraries without coders, open source software like this is probably not a good long-term option. I can usually muddle around enough to get something installed, but if we eventually upgrade our versions of PHP or MySQL and something breaks, I won’t know what to do to fix it. And when I leave my job in the future, I have no idea if they will make web skills a real priority when hiring my successor. Non-coders are better off relying on thriving community-driven projects with lots of people fixing stuff, extending the functionality, and writing documentation. That was my next stop.

It’s kind of funny that it didn’t dawn on me to try MediaWiki until I’d exhausted most of the other reasonable options (does that mean I can’t be called the Queen of Wikis anymore?). It’s not that a wiki is a bad idea, but I worried about getting my colleagues on-board with using it. While MediaWiki is not the most difficult thing in the world to use, wiki markup isn’t intuitive, which I see as the big barrier to its use. Anything that involves learning a new way of doing things is going to be difficult for some people. I thought about installing a WYSIWYG editor, but I have a bad taste in my mouth from recently upgrading Drupal and having TinyMCE and the chat extension break. I want to be as little dependent as posible on extensions that could break when I upgrade the software. This is an important thing to consider when you’re using wiki/blog/CMS software. These extensions are great, but if they are dependent on a specific version of the software, you will either be stuck not upgrading or will have to make it compatible with the latest version on your own. Just like the wiki/blog/CMS itself, make sure there is a community behind the extensions you choose; a community that will make absolutely sure these extensions work with the latest version of the product.

There are a few key benefits of using MediaWiki software for this purpose in my opinion:

• It’s the software that runs Wikipedia, so it isn’t a project that’s going to go South anytime soon.
• Granular permissioning allows me to give my colleagues only the rights they absolutely need and to give a select few more rights.
• If we want faculty or students to contribute in the future, it’s possible.
• The full-text of the wiki is searchable.
• We can assign each subject guide to categories so that the guides can be browsed as well.
• It’s completely flexible; we can make the pages be however we want.

The two big negatives in my opinion are the lack of a WYSIWYG editor (which is something they said was soon going to be a part of MediaWiki back in August 2006) and the fact that it’s a pain in the behind to monkey around with the look. Because it’s designed specifically for the Wikipedia, making it easy to change the look wasn’t a big priority. I think I “broke” the wiki 20 times while messing around with the PHP for the skin I’d chosen. I’d make a change, get an error message, back out of my change, figure out what I did wrong, fix it so that the syntax is correct, make another change, get an error message again… I think I’ve made it look halfway decent (click on the pics below to view the full-sized images of the template I created for my colleagues), though there’s still a lot of tweaking I want to do, like adding our logo. We don’t have any content up yet, because no one has given me any, but once I receive it, it shouldn’t take me long to have it looking good. I’m itching to get some guides up there already!

To deal with the problem of database links being scattered all over the place, I came up with a decent, but not perfect, solution that I borrowed from UNC Chapel Hill. I noticed that in their subject guides, they didn’t link directly to the database but to what was essentially an “authority record” for the database; a single page where the link to and description of the database resided. I decided that I’m going to create a page for every database we have and in the subject guides, we will simply link to that page. Therefore, if the link to a database changes, we’ll only be fixing it in one place in the subject guide wiki rather than a million places. It means two clicks for the student, which sucks, but I’ll try to make it as obvious as possible what they need to click on once they get to that intermediate page.

I don’t think MediaWiki is the perfect solution and other solutions will work better at other libraries. I think it’s important when looking at any alternative to static HTML subject guides that you sit down and really think about what functionality/features you absolutely need vs. what would be cool but isn’t totally necessary. The simpler you can make things, the easier it will be to maintain. Then, look at what is already out there. Will anything out there meet your needs or do you need to create something yourself (or pay someone to create something for you)? Finally, think about whether this is a sustainable solution. What will it take to maintain this next month? Next year? In three years? If it’s an open source tool, is it developed by a community or just one person? If that person stopped development, would someone on your staff (or in IT) be able to continue development so that it continues to work and isn’t a security hazard? The same goes for something you create yourself or pay someone to create; think about what it will take to make this work in the long-term, not just to get it working now.

Honestly, I have my doubts that these subject guides are going to make much of a difference for our students. Looking at our Web stats, I see that our undergrads simply aren’t visiting our site, and I don’t think that is going to change. I’ve been putting course guides up for my own and my colleagues’ instruction sessions and it hasn’t impacted Web traffic (beyond the day of the session). I think the key is to focus on being where our students are, both physically and online. If we can understand their information-seeking behavior and put ourselves in their path, right at reach, we’ll be much more likely to have an impact. I think the library resources should be like the impulse buy area in a store. It’s just so easy when you’re paying for your groceries to reach out and grab that Star Magazine or that pack of gum. I want the library to be that pack of gum (or Star Magazine… that would work too). And while we truly have achieved that with the online graduate students, who have the library right in their classroom, we haven’t even started to move in that direction with the on-campus folks. Putting our stuff where our users are… now that would be 2.0.

Here are some highlights from this week:

our terrific presenters: In her talk this week on RSS, Michele Mizejewski likened getting content via RSS to getting a magazine via a subscription versus getting a magazine at the newsstand, which we all thought was brilliant! Jason Griffey taught us stuff about del.icio.us that even veterans like me didn’t know. Gabriel Lundeen made tagging easy to understand and quite fun (Gabriel, you should be on the speaking circuit)! Melissa Rethlefsen got folks really excited about syndicating feeds onto their Websites. All of their presentations are linked from the Week 2 page.

connecting at a distance: Sandra Hodgson considers how social software can save time and add richness to our interactions with colleagues at a distance (certainly something we’ve found in this class!). Robin Grant wonders if blogging can help lonely people connect to others online. Jill Markgraf considers how to use some of these tools in the distance learning classroom.

RSS-mania: Rachel Kingcade and Josalyn Gervasio (who must have been hungry while writing her post) get absolutely giddy over RSS. Josalyn gets really into syndicating feeds on a Web page and inspires some of her classmates to play more with technology.

folksonomies versus taxonomies: Tiah Edmunson-Morton and Josalyn Gervasio muse about folksonomies. Tiah asks “why would we encourage a move away from what has become an essential part of libraries and their functionality?” Personally, I don’t think we are moving away, but are moving to incorporate both librarian and user-generated metadata in our systems. It doesn’t have to be an either/or dilemma.

playing with tech is fun!: Shireen Deboo discusses how RSS and del.icio.us have revolutionized how she keeps up with information and “keeps found things found.” Karen Bjork calls Bloglines “my very own mini-conference” (great analogy!).

all about the workplace: Tamara Cameron, Candice Watkins, and Katharina Penner have some great ideas for implementing del.icio.us and RSS in their library settings.

del.icio.us anxiety: Fred Jahns worries about choosing the right tag while Robin Grant wonders what will happen to her stuff if del.icio.us goes out of business.

are del.icio.us results useful?: Missy Van Dusen brings up the idea of del.icio.us group-think, which is not something I’d ever considered before. Jini Errichetti questions whether searching or browsing tags really helps you find results any better than searching Google.

is it worth the effort?: Tamara Cameron considers how to implement social software tools in a setting where staff thinks e-mail is too impersonal. Jini Errichetti asks “who has time to read all this stuff?” and wonders if her staff could grasp stuff like RSS.

Week 3 is all about wikis, a topic near and dear to my heart! If it’s a topic you’re interested in too, join in on the conversations by commenting on our participants’ posts.

Some very cool things about it:

• RSS feeds for every search you do. Want to create an ego feed for your name? See when other librarians write about LibWorm or GoogleCSE or wikis? Just do a search and subscribe to the feed, baby!
• The ability to search by date or by relevance. That’s very important when you want to see the most recent posts on a subject.
• Feed Categories – groups of blogs and other sites gathered together by categories that David assigned to them and that can be browsed as a group. Not sure if they can be searched separately from the other blogs and Web sites, but that would definitely be cool. You can subscribe to each of these groupings, so if you wanted to receive podcasts from all academic libraries, you could easily do that with a single RSS feed. HOT!
• Subjects – pre-made searches for certain subjects such as Library 2.0, wikis, ALA, and OPAC. Rather than searching just for wikis, the wikis search searches for wikis, wiki, wikipedia, etc. And of course, you can subscribe to each of these searches.
• LibWorm has a built-in aggregator function where you can subscribe to feeds and read them right in LibWorm.

I think Technorati is great for a lot of things, but when I subscribed to a search for wikis there, I ended up with a ridiculous amount of stuff that was totally irrelevant to what I really was looking for. Considering the limited net this search engine is casting, the results are much more likely to be relevant. Congratulations to David and Frankie! You have created an amazing resource for the library community!

This is highly frustrating. But ultimately, I know I wrote a post, so I didn’t worry about it too much. The thought did cross my mind that it probably happens with other blogs as well, but I didn’t have any confirmation. Today, however, there were some references to posts on Library Stuff- and I knew I hadn’t seen them. Currently when I’m logged into Bloglines, it lists Library Stuff as being last updated on October 25 – which is not the case. There have been many posts since the 25th. My own feed is listed as last updated on October 28. This is a problem!!!!

I’ve been noticing this too. I wrote a bunch of posts from Dartmouth on Friday and only the first one showed up on Friday. I wrote additional posts on Saturday and Sunday and still only that one Dartmouth post was showing in Bloglines. Finally, on Monday, the feed updated and there were eight new posts from my blog. On Sunday morning, I wrote to Bloglines to ask them about the problem, but I haven’t heard back from them. Ok, I didn’t expect them to get back to me on Sunday, but it’s now Tuesday and I haven’t heard a peep from them.

I know a very large number of librarians who read feeds use Bloglines and I’ve been a loyal user for years. Have any other people noticed this happening with their blog or someone else’s? How can we have a distributed conversation when pieces of that conversation are not getting through? It seems like some blogs are updating normally and others are taking days for the content to show up in Bloglines. What gives??

Update: A suggestion was made in the comments that I add http://www.bloglines.com/ping to the list of sites that Wordpress automatically pings when I publish a new post. Well, I did that and published a new post tonight. Several hours later, the post still hasn’t shown up on Bloglines. Sigh…

Ken’s one of those funny people who says that they’re not a coder and then launches into talking about how he used Perl to do really cool things with RSS in a single sentence. He’s wicked smart and wicked knowledgeable about RSS.