Tag Archives: blogs

Links of Interest 26/8/09

Leave a reply

Goings-on
University of Otago Law Library has a new blog to go with their new library.

Massey University Library have added book ratings to their catalogue – when logged in, your ratings show in yellow; when logged out, average ratings show in blue.

Westlaw have annoyed librarians everywhere with an ad that “Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, chances are, you’re spending too much time at the library. What you need is fast, reliable research you can access right in your office. And all it takes is West®.” They have since apologised.

Useful sites
A Digital Outrigger is a blog covering issues in digital libraries and usability – it posts regular link roundups and is well tagged to allow focusing on specific areas of interest.

The JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool lets you compare journal title lists, databases, and ebook platforms.

Fiction
Heard of Project Gutenberg but don’t have time to read all its books? Now Project Twutenberg aims to convert each of these books into a 140-character summary.

Food for thought
After a presentation on Digital Reference, some librarians have started talking about the emerging trend towards the real-time web and the real-time library. David Lee King points out, “remove all the 2.0, digital, online stuff from this idea, and we’re simply talking about the real, physical, day-to-day experience of a normal (yet very good) library. Emerging online services are working to make this normal, active experience we have at the physical library the same when we’re online.“

RSS feeds on Facebook

3 Replies

I’ve played with a number of Facebook applications that claim to let you import RSS feeds into Facebook – and then mysteriously fail to update them. RSS feeds that don’t update are not overly useful.

I finally concluded that if we wanted to import our library blogs into our (currently in demo) library Facebook page, we’d have to use Friendfeed instead. Only when I actually tried this out, it turns out that the Friendfeed application doesn’t work on pages.

So I went trawling through Facebook’s RSS applications again and (perhaps because this was a couple of months since I last tried) found one that seems to work: RSS-Connect(*). It looks clean, the display is reasonably customisable, and it works smoothly and intuitively to open/close items when clicked and take you through to the original item on demand. And most importantly, it really does update automatically – you even get to choose how often you want it to check for updates.

(*) There must be a way to get a link that shows you information about the app before forcing you to add it, but Facebook isn’t intuitive to me and I haven’t found it yet.

ETA 22/5/09 I can’t recommend RSS-Connect, aka Social RSS, any more as it frequently loads either very slowly or (more often) not at all. This leaves me without a working RSS application again. Anyone know of anything, or want to create one?

ETA 17/7/09 RSS-Connect aka Social RSS is back in my good books with some caveats; see comments for more.