Blogging and RSS: A Librarian's Guide

Citation

Secker, J. (2007), "Blogging and RSS: A Librarian's Guide", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 41 No. 4, pp. 433-435. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330710831657

I was keen to read this book as I have recently started work on a project to explore how different types of social software can be used to enhance distance learners' use of libraries. Libraries and Social Software in Education (LASSIE) has also meant that for the past five months I have been writing a blog (available at: http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/). Part of the project has involved undertaking a literature review, and Sauers' book is the only monograph to date that I have found devoted to the topic of blogging and RSS feeds in libraries, although there are now two other books to note which deal with Web 2.0 and libraries (Bradley, 2007; Farkas, 2007). Nevertheless, blogs are clearly a very important part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon and over the past few months I've come to regard RSS as the key technology that lies at the heart of understanding how the web has changed. To be honest my instinct when first agreeing to referee the book was to wonder how an entire book of just over 250 pages, could concentrate solely on the topic of blogs and RSS.

The book is divided into eight chapters; four on blogs and four devoted to the topic of RSS feeds. You might regard Chapter One, an introduction to blogs, as being superfluous for most of us in the library world, who are no doubt overloaded with talk of blogs and familiar with the concept. However, it does provide a good overview of the different types of blogs that exist – many people often think of the more personal diary type blog, whereas in fact many organisations are now setting them up for news information. It also includes some good background information on the “blog phenomena” and why you might want to set one up. Chapter Two then looks in some detail at what it terms the “Library Blogosphere” with part one looking at some blogs and part two focusing on the librarians who blog. A number of key librarians have been blogging for some time and Sauers interviews a series of these individuals looking at their motivations for blogging, their tips for getting started, the strengths and weaknesses of blogs as they see it. At this point the book started to draw me in as it highlighted some key library bloggers I did know about (Jenny Levine and Lorcan Dempsey) and others I didn't – but I'm now reading their blogs (e.g. Walt Crawford). There are lots of screenshots of blogs and example posts, which partly explains the book's length, but gives a nice flavour of blogs that you might be less familiar with.

Chapter Three goes on to look in some detail at setting up your own blog. There are lots of tips for getting started and quite a detailed overview of setting up a blog hosted on Blogger.com. On page 79 Sauers recognises that this section of the book is likely to date most quickly and suggests using the Help files on the website. Nevertheless, there then follows a further 20‐30 pages concentrating on setting up and managing your blog in Blogger.com. In fact, I followed these instructions just a few days ago and found that largely speaking they are still accurate, but one wonders if the level of detail was really necessary. I also did find the basic set‐up extremely straightforward, and didn't need to refer to this book. That's not to say that there wasn't a lot of useful information I may well come back to about managing the blog, and for those who are more technical p. 116 has a useful list of XHTML Blogger tags. The chapter finishes with a brief look at other forms such as blogging, including moblogging (mobile blogging) and podcasting or audio blogging.

Chapter Five then turns it attention to the topic of RSS (or feeds), which Bradley (2007) actually covers at the start of his book, as he believes it is the key to Web 2.0 technologies. No one likes acronyms and in teaching staff how to read blogs and use RSS feeds I know the acronym can put some people off. So in a book that is primarily about blogging, I do understand why Sauers tackles it second. He provides a good introduction to what RSS is calling it “the technology… allows internet users to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds; these are typically sites that change or add content regularly”. In my department we use the BBC Guide to RSS (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm) which is simple and straightforward, but not mentioned here. Sauers then goes on to look at the history of feed developments (pp. 124‐126), what a feed file is (a bit of XML), different feed types and how to identify them. He also provides some screenshots from blogs, highlighting the feeds.

Chapter Six turns its attention to looking at how you might use feeds typically in a feed reader or what Sauers calls an “aggregator”. He looks at a wide range of aggregators, many of which I wasn't familiar with, but concentrates mainly on the web‐based aggregator, Bloglines. Pages 149‐184 are really devoted to using Bloglines, from setting up an account, through to managing your feed subscriptions. Again, there are lots of screenshots and one feels this section of the book might again date fairly quickly. However, to date I've been using Google Reader, and the detailed instructions about Bloglines are going to come in handy for setting up a Bloglines account for myself, but also developing training materials for staff that might want to use it.

Chapter Seven includes lots of great examples of what Sauers describes as “noteworthy feeds”. I found it packed full of examples of libraries and library organisations using Web 2.0 technologies. Unsurprisingly, almost all the examples are from the US, although the news feeds from the BBC features. Sauers then goes on to highlight RSS‐based services that allow users to perform a search and then subscribe to a feed from that search. GoogleNews is available in this way for example. On page 209 Sauers looks at what he believes is the best current example of how RSS can be used by libraries to benefit their users. The tool is called LibraryElf (www.libraryelf.com) it can, for example, notify users when books are ready to be picked up or when they are overdue. These alerts can be sent as a feed to an aggregator, via e‐mail or via SMS text message. I shall certainly be exploring how this might work in more detail. Pages 211‐218 then looks at a host of miscellaneous feeds and services from tracking eBay auctions, to using del.icio.us the social bookmarking site.

The final chapter of the book looks at creating feeds yourself. It is probably the most technical of all the chapters but explains three ways of creating a feed from your content. It's a fairly short chapter and most librarians may think it is best passed on to your Systems Librarian or your IT techie to get them to create a feed for you. I must confess it was the least appealing of the chapters to me, but I can see the value in adding it to the book. Sauers finishes with an Afterward, where he encourages librarians to use blogs to “tell their story” arguing (somewhat rightly) that we are notoriously bad at publicity and PR and blogs can be a good way to shout about what we do. He then finishes with some recommended reading, a detailed appendix of Feed Code Examples and a useful Glossary.

While I still believe over 250 pages is perhaps overkill, I found Sauers highly readable and packed full of excellent examples. If he was updating his book this year I would hope there might be a few more examples from outside the US, but given when this book was written the US‐bias is no surprise. I'm also pleasantly surprised that in what must be almost a year since it went to press it hasn't dated yet. For those of us in the UK and elsewhere just getting to grips with Web 2.0 and wondering whether blogging is a good option I highly recommend this book. However, one thing that stuck with me was a comment from one of the librarian bloggers featured on pp. 74‐76. Jessamyn West is a keen blogger (and runs www.librarian.net) but citing Walt Crawford, urges only those of us who have something to say, to set up a blog. Wise words indeed!