Task : Feeds

I went ahead and set up my news feeds on Google Reader since I've already got a Gmail account and am using Blogger. Should I be worried that I'm using all Google products? In any event, setting up feeds really couldn't be all that much easier. I'm set up to recieve feeds for several news searches that I regularly do (including a Google news search for all news relating to libraries and archives) and also set up for several blogs that I frequent. It is really nice to be able to just see the quick news and blog headlines rather than head to each and every site. I'll have to do some work to narrow my feeds though a bit because on several of my news feeds, I get all aspects of the news including categories that I'm actually not all that interested in or that despite my best intentions I don't read all that thoroughly anyhow.

I had to do some thinking about how we at Lane Library could make use of feeds ourselves. An obvious option is to make our blog available with a feed so that people could just watch for updates. I think that setting up a feed for our new acquisitions could be really great, though we'd definitely need to narrow it to subject areas so that the weekly lists weren't totally overwhelming. I looked online a bit to see if there were other libraries creating feeds and to find out how successful they were. (If you create a feed, is there some sort of counter that allows you to track how many people are accessing it?) Here's a link to a good article about how libraries can use RSS feeds: http://www.llrx.com/features/richsite.htm