Month: May 2006

Open-Access Digital Archive

The University of Michigan libraries have released a new digital archive, Deep Blue. Deep Blue aims:

… to provide access to the work that makes Michigan a leader in research, teaching, and creativity. By representing our faculty, staff, and student scholars, as individuals and as members of communities, Deep Blue provides a framework for preserving and finding the best scholarly and artistic work done at the University.

The library is offering its academic research colleagues permanence in the digital environment for research work. They acknowledge something more: by publishing through the University, the scholar’s works gain the weight of a major research institution. They’ve launched with an impressive collection of nearly 24,000 digital works, dating as far back as the 1950s. Access to some materials may be restricted based on the work’s copyright requirements, but much, if not the vast majority, of the collection is available in full text to everyone.
Now what they really need is RSS feeds for their author, topic, and collection lists…. But that will come, I’m sure.

[Via The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog.]

Education as Marketing Tool

Jill Stover, in her “Library Marketing — Thinking Outside the Book” blog, points to a press release from Powered, Inc., describing research Powered did on the impact of online education. The release highlights the findings that 90% of their study group of 200,000 consumers who participated in online education programs are likely to recommend the experience to a friend, and 94% of respondents have a more favorable perception of the brand because of the experience.
While the study was focused on commercial ventures, Jill notes:

What does this mean for libraries? A lot. Marketing is becoming less about pushing stuff out to people, and more about empowering them to succeed. Library instruction is one great way to do that as patrons gain valuable knowledge skills while librarians are positioned as experts on particular topics. … Faculty may appreciate lessons on RSS that help them keep up with the literature in their fields; new mothers may like guidance on how to find the best free resources on childhood development.”

Jill makes an excellent point. The resources libraries have to offer, combined with librarians’ traditional emphasis on personalize and detailed research assistance, creates a powerful marketing tool. Offering how-to classes on technologies — and on subjects — is a good way to show patrons the value of the library. With libraries’ patron base increasingly relying on the Internet to use the library, online education is the way to go.

Zetoc RSS Table of Contents Service from the British Library

Zetoc, the British Library’s electronic Table of Contents service, now offers table of contents RSS feeds for a vast number of online journals. Available to Zetoc members only, this new service is described in the May 2006 D-Lib Magazine. For subscribers, the RSS feed links you to the British Library’s document delivery service as well as to an institutional OpenURL resolver for locally licensed versions of the articles.
Ah, to be in England….

More Geographic Blogging

In an earlier post (Geotagging, posted on 17 June 2005), I talked about an extension to RSS that would allow for encoding of geographic metadata into an RSS feed.
GeoNames RSS to to GeoRSS Converter takes this one logical step further. The GeoNames service takes an RSS feed, searches each entry for recognizable geographical locations, and returns a feed with the appropriate geographical metadata added on. And if you then view the feed through a GeoRSS newsreader (as the GeoNames web site points out, there aren’t many of these; they suggest the ACME GeoRSS Reader), you get a map with the locations of the item being discussed in the RSS entries.
This is perfect for news feeds — get a map of the world with the locations of the each news item shown on screen. As an example, take a look at today’s Reuters news. You can see where in the world the news is happening.
On a smaller scale, it might have great application in a library for local news, genealogical research, community events, and so forth. Let people pull up a map of events and pick the ones closest to their houses. Very neat stuff!

[Via RSS Specifications.]