OPML

Librarian bundles for philosophy scholars.

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My last post discusses how some clever librarians are using web tools to bundle useful resources to clients. Here’s an example of how a philosophy subject librarian could use them.

1. SEARCH BOX FOR MURDOCH UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHY OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES.

The search box below uses google to make a single search of these resources. (Try it – it’s a real one and works)





HOW TO: follow the steps at Google Co-Op searches. (I added the banana on wheels image just to play around with adding a logo).

2. BUTTON TO ADD ABOVE SEARCH BOX TO IE7 BROWSER TOOLBAR’S LIST OF SEARCH ENGINES

If you click this buttonreferral link you’ll see a page with a clickable button. Click it to add the search box above as a “search provider” in your Internet Explorer 7 toolbar.

HOW TO: follow the steps at Innovate

3. STARTER BUNDLE OF USEFUL RSS FEEDS FOR PHILOSOPHERS
Some useful blogs for philosophy scholars are:
Epistememlinks list of blogs
Conscious Entities
Pain for philosophers
Philosophy of friendship

I’ve been playing with OPMLManager.com, but didn’t quite get it together to create an OPML file for importing into an RSS aggregator, but I’m sure you get the idea.

HOW TO: Follow the pointers from What I learned today.

Thanks to CM for sparking my interest in this one.

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New librarian skill – bundling!

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

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.

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OPML and the Internet Librarian conference

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OPML is widely used to group a whole lot of RSS feeds into one bundle, ready for importing into an RSS aggregator.

I just imported my first OPML file into RSS Reader. I tried at Bloglines , but it said it would take 2 hours to import, and I was just too impatient. Bloglines has been a bit flakey recently, anyhow, with outages and delayed updates.

You could use OPML to provide “starter feeds” for people setting up RSS. You could provide information from a subject search, especially if the client wanted to know relevant resources rather than information. The grazr box on Peta‘s sidebar at Innovate is another use of OPML. To create OPML files, you can use a site like OPML Workstation.

What was in my bundle? Feeds associated with the Internet Librarian 2006 conference held 23 -26 October in Monterey, California. Over 1000 delegates attended and it had sessions like videocasting with David Lee King, RSS feeds and javascript with Meredith Farkas and mashups with John Blyberg. Here’s the full program.

The OPML file was created by Nicole Engard at What I Learned Today .The goodies she packed in were feeds for :

  • del.icio.us tags IL06 and IL2006
  • technorati tags IL06 and IL2006
  • flickr photos tagged IL06 or IL2006
  • conference wiki at pbwiki
  • conference organiser’s blog

This week has been quiet in my “library techie” folder at bloglines. Last week it was full of detailed notes from the conference sessions. If I want to follow up any, I can look at posts from 23-26 October in blogs on this list of people blogging the conf. It was compiled by Jennifer at Life as I know it .

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: New beginning

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