LISNews: Librarian News

Meredith F (Information Wants to Be Free) has the demographics of her 2007 Biblioblogsphere Survey up. Some interesting points!

Anonymous Patron writes "The folks at Library Journal seem to be trying oh so hard to be very cutting-edge and trendy. Take a good, close look at their home page and you'll see blogging, talkback, all manner of boxes and buttons, and lately, what seem to be many "news" stories about vendor products, presumably a cheap way to romance advertisers with free content as an inducement to spend more on display ads...at the expense of editorial integrity.

Best, though, could be the RSS feed they must be mighty proud of. Just enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/LibraryJournalNews into your feed reader and you'll quickly, easily and conveniently get the latest library news aggregated at the click of a mouse...with the most recent one dated March 12, 2007!!

Nobody at the all high, mighty, trendy and opinionated LJ has bothered to update the RSS feed in almost six months. Nice, huh?"

Steve Johnson writes "An interview with Aaron Swartz, creator of the "basic framework" of the new Open Library Project now sponsored by Internet Archive. His comment on existing bibliographic tools: "I can search an academic library or WorldCat, but the quality of data is pretty weak - you can get basic bibliographic info, but no reviews and weak search and a painful interface and most require a subscription."

Read More Here"

Michael R. Balmer writes "RSS is blossoming into the de facto protocol used by many websites as the means of distributing their news and information. However, not all websites support this feature yet. I recently came across a nifty tool called Feedity, which is an RSS generator for web pages without a web syndication format. Feedity lets you can create RSS for any ANY webpage. Feedity will take virtually any web page, and convert it into a fully formed RSS document. Highly recommended for any tech-savvy librarian. -- Read More