RSS ruminations redux

RSS feeds seem like such a good way to communicate with faculty (and students), but let me talk about faculty first. I think many faculty would love to subscribe to a few focused research-related feeds, but the trick is to figure out a way to show them how to match their normal computing environment (their particular online habitat) with the appropriate feed aggregator/reader. I used to think that when Outlook came with its own feed reader, we would have a great starting point for this, but I suspect that not all faculty use Outlook the way that staff tend to do. This is especially probably the case with adjuncts. I can almost envision a wizard-like approach where faculty are walked through the typical options for locating their feeds (browser, desktop, Outlook, etc.) And then, of course supplying suggestions for feeds to subscribe to (library, news, journal feeds, scholarly blogs, grant news, etc) -- we would probably want to research this. Then we could send out a package which gets them up and running. I know that other divisions on campus are interested in this, so this might be an area of collaboration with Library & IT, or Public Affairs, or wherever. It needs some big publicity and maybe even some branding.

Getting the most out of a blog

Actually, I haven't really felt like I had enough time to devote to maintaining a personal blog. When I get the blogging urge, it is usually for our WordPress Library blog that displays on the homepage. I do think that more should be done with the Library blog. I would like more homepage real estate, more images that could display on homepage as well as blog, and also a separate place on the homepage for Library alerts. I really wish that we could figure out how to publicize the blog on campus, get people to subscribe, but that would me that we would have to do a better job of thinking of blog topics. gtg cu