New librarian skill - bundling!

New toys are fun. Even better when they herald a change in how we do things.

• Clever Corey blogged on lint about the LISZEN site’s use of Google Co-op searches, then used it himself to put a search box on lint’s Australian Library blogs page. It does a full text search of the blogs listed there.
• Clever Peta made a button that adds her library’s catalogue as a search provider on an IE7 toolbar.
• Clever Nicole made an OPML file of RSS feeds relevant to the Internet Librarian conference.

Their play paves the way for regular librarians to combine our collection development skills and powerful web tools to “bundle” electronic information, resources and searches for our clients

Prerequisites to use some of the powerful “bundling” tools are:

• Librariany skills to select something useful to bundle
• Ability to follow step by step instructions
• Ability to cut and paste text
• A bit of knowledge about where to embed code in a web page…or skills to use the “View Source” option and steal ideas from other web pages.

I work as a Philosophy subject librarian. In my next post, I’ve used the “how to’s” from the posts above to show some of the relevant “bundling” services I could create for philosophy scholars at my university.