Thing #3 - RSS

I have had a Bloglines account for over a year now, but I haven't really used it a lot. Now that I am focusing on Google's services lately, (iGoogle, Blogger, Sharing Documents, Reader), I find that I will visit those feeds much more regularly from Google Reader as I am in Google anyway. I plan to do some more comparing between Bloglines and Google Reader, but so far I think the integration factor is going to win me over to Google.

One service I definitely think we could develop to our customers in a health care environment is a seamless way for them to subscribe to feeds of their favorite journals to receive Tables of Contents. I have helped many of them subscribe for e-mail updates from many of the publishers and for some titles we've set up saved alerts on specific journal titles in some of the databases. That only works if the database is updated very frequently and soon after the publication is released (this can really vary with some databases). Both of these methods involve getting an e-mail, and we all have too many e-mails in our accounts. They are also disparate e-mails, coming mixed in with all the other stuff one gets throughout the day. My goal is to develop this service from our intranet web page and collect the RSS feeds for the top journals and make them easy to subscribe to.

The other goal I have is to be an advocate for the use of feeds in the organization. Later this week, I have been invited to participate in a visioning meeting for encouraging the use of more 2.0 services in the organization, so I hope we are getting closer to the integration of 2.0 tools in the daily work flow. There is so much talk about evidence-based practice in healthcare (as well as in other industries) and in order to stay up on the evidence, we have to make it easier for people to integrate tracking new developments in their daily work flow. Private companies have had this down for decades with the various competitive intelligence efforts they use, alert services and news tracking of competitors -- now the tools are coming for the masses to start doing some of this and it is a really exciting time to see the technologies being offered for everyone.

In this exercise, I added a couple library blogs as news feeds, the New England Journal of Medicine current issue, an NIH press release feed, several library related feeds, and a local news and events feed. These were easy to find either on a publication web site or the list of library blogs that was provided.

Thing #2

Interesting article on the Web/Library 2.0. I especially like the idea of "radical trust" as part of Darlene Fichter's original definition of Library 2.0 way back in 2006. This is the component that is unique to the new use of technology ... the emphasis is on "open access," "sharing" and "taking risks"... all things that some libraries have always done, so they should be able to do now as well with a few changes.

I work in a healthcare setting and a recent article in Modern Healthcare talks about Healthcare 2.0. One example of this is the personal health record movement that allows patients to sign into and even contribute to their personal health data, when and where they want. I worry about privacy and safety of that personal health information as it will often reside on a commercial vendor's web site, not in a locked medical records area of a clinic or hospital.

I have attended a number of in-person and webinar conferences on the various 2.0 applications that are available for libraries to implement, but actually moving these into the work flow and political realities of a tightly controlled business environment has not been easy for the library in which I work. Many of the staff are using the technologies personally, but we haven't moved into actually using them to communicate and serve our customers. We risk missing out on their implementation in our organization if we aren't sitting at the table with the various information services and marketing people who will likely drive the use of these new tools. We want to be the drivers, but to make that happen we need to partner with the clinical staff, who are the real drivers in our setting. We know some of them are using blogs, wikis and other social software apps. through their professional associations , so they should be receptive to them in their exchanges with the library.

Thing #1

I just completed adding a photo to my blog, as well as links to a couple blogs that I like. I hope to add to this list. It was pretty easy to add page elements using the Blogger software.

We have been talking about creating a blog for nurses where I work, but the challenge is defining some of the parameters for the blog. I think a blog should really have a primary purpose or theme, especially in a work setting. And who will be the administrator of the blog? How will it be monitored? Can anyone post anything? Does it need an administrator like a listserv to sift out the wheat from the chaff? Also, how will it be promoted? Library directors and company CEOs are blogging these days, as well as front-line librarians, but is it appropriate, useful, even possible to promote blogging amongst busy workers in a healthcare setting? I think those of us over "a certain age" feel it may take too much time on an ongoing basis, but I wonder if the younger folks probably wouldn't (and don't) find it time-consuming at all. Food for thought anyway!

First Post

This is a great opportunity to play with the new technologies and I'm looking forward to the lessons. Like listening to new music, learning about new web tools involves keeping an open mind and letting the theme take you where it will. There aren't any wrong or right answers, you can't "break" it, and we aren't being graded, so, yahoo, let's have some fun!

I work in a smallish library in a very specialized setting, so I appreciate being exposed to lots of other folks from different environments.

Glad to be on board with 23-Things-on-a-Stick!