LISNews

We’re getting closer and closer to the start of another academic year and a new intake of LIS students. A question that arises is how to follow LISNews. Recognizing that people have different interests and also different habits in consuming Internet content, it is necessary to perhaps list some of those tools.

You can subscribe to LISNews via e-mail. A page with an example of an e-mail and the sign-up form can be seen at https://lisnews.org/node/28182. E-mails normally come out once per weekday.

LISNews has a multitude of RSS feeds. The main stories RSS feed is https://lisnews.org/rss.xml and you can get wind of new comments by following https://lisnews.org/crss in your RSS reader. RSS feeds off the blogs do not necessarily function at the moment. A partial list of feeds by topic tag is available at https://lisnews.org/syndication.

LISNews posts to Twitter when most new posts are put up. You can find such at http://twitter.com/LISNews.

While there is a tweeter on Twitter for LISNews, there is an automatic posting account on Identica. You can find that at http://identi.ca/lisnews. Identica provides a variety of data export formats so that you can consume posts in your feed reader.

The feed for the LISNews Netcast Network, presently helmed by Interim Coordinator Daniel Messer, is http://feeds.feedburner.com/LISNewsNetcasts. You can also subscribe to LISNews Netcast Network posts via e-mail. You can find the network’s early vodcast efforts at http://listen-from-lisnews.blip.tv/ although it should be noted that that effort may be revived, equipment permitting.

As for other specialty content within the LISHost constellation, you can read press releases related to the library realm at LISWire. LISWire can be found at http://www.liswire.com while the feed for your reader is http://www.liswire.com/aggregator/rss/1. If you have a press release to post, it should go to LISWire first before LISNews.

Also as part of the LISHost constellation for those wanting to get their feet wet with podcasts before investing themselves too much is LISFeeds. LISFeeds is a planet aggregator that brings in show posts into one web page. Click on an episode title to reach the program’s own site for playback. You can find that online at http://www.lisfeeds.com/. In case you are worried that the planet back-end might be stuck and not have updated, this account on Identica is updated when an update cycle concludes: http://identi.ca/lisfeeds.

LISHost can be found at http://www.lishost.org.

A few weeks ago Blake Carver commissioned me to come up with a summer guest author series. Unexpected twists and turns helped delay the launch of the series until now. With this post I can now kick off the series.

Guests will be joining us for the next couple of weeks to contribute essays. A particular author has been set for each week and that author will be posting two or more essays. These are intended to spark new lines of thought as well as to perhaps amuse you.

I will be kicking off the series with essays this week. The guests to come will be surprises. Our very own Blake Carver will wrap up the series in its last week.

There are a variety of ways to follow the series. The first option would be to come to the site. The branch of the taxonomy tree to watch is “Summer Series”. Another option would be to utilize RSS. The feed to plug into your feed reader is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SummerSeries.

If you wish to receive an e-mail containing whole essays when they are posted, you can sign up using the form below. E-mails post between 1100 GMT and 1500 GMT. This is a two step process. After going through the first step below as well as the consequential pop-up, you will need to look for an e-mail in your inbox bearing the subject line Activate your Email Subscription to: LISNews Summer Series and click on the verification link. If you forget to do that, you will not receive anything in your inbox.

Enter your email address:

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Essays will be posted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. In the end, the collected essays will be posted to Internet Archive. For those not favorably disposed to online archives, the collection will also be made available at cost in print form through Lulu.

Announcing The LISNews Summer Series by Stephen Michael Kellat is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

This is a Google search box that searches only LISNEWS

By unanimous vote of network program producers, the LISNews Netcast Network is taking a week off. The release of Tech for Techies will still occur at 0400 UTC on April 10th ^{(what is this in my local time)}. No new programs will be released until 0400 UTC on April 20th ^{(what is this in my local time)}. Network producers will be taking time to catch up writing features during the hiatus.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation. In case you missed it, the most recent episode of LISTen had two big tech interviews while the Faceless Historian presented an expanded version of his recent Ignite Phoenix talk. Catching up during the hiatus is encouraged if you are curious.

For those of you keeping score at home, the summary stats out of Urchin for this year:

January:
Total Sessions 338611
Total Pageviews 1832058
Total Hits 4313227
Total Bytes Transferred 70414920980
Average Sessions Per Day 10922.94
Average Pageviews Per Day 59098.65
Average Hits Per Day 139136.35
Average Bytes Transferred Per Day 2271449063
Average Pageviews Per Session 5.41
Average Hits Per Session 12.74
Average Bytes Per Session 207952
Average Length of Session 504

February:
Total Sessions 346121
Total Pageviews 1912144
Total Hits 4370870
Total Bytes Transferred 72124184075
Average Sessions Per Day 11290.04
Average Pageviews Per Day 68290.86
Average Hits Per Day 156102.50
Average Bytes Transferred Per Day 2575863716
Average Pageviews Per Session 6.05
Average Hits Per Session 13.83
Average Bytes Per Session 228153
Average Length of Session 562

March:
Total Sessions 353,154.00
Total Pageviews 2,152,255.00
Total Hits 4,671,204.00
Total Bytes Transferred 77.11 GB
Average Sessions Per Day 11,392.06
Average Pageviews Per Day 69,427.58
Average Hits Per Day 150,684.00
Average Bytes Transferred Per Day 2.49 GB
Average Pageviews Per Session 6.09
Average Hits Per Session 13.23
Average Bytes Per Session 228.95 KB
Average Length of Session 00:08:28

I set up a few forums where you can discuss things that may or may not be related to libraries. There’s a Forum To Discuss LISNews and one to Discuss The Podcast.

I also set up an area For Politics and a couple for technology, One On Drupal and another On The Internet.

Let me know if there’s something else you’d like to see.

Long time readers of LISNews may recall a botched attempt a few years ago, I think I got it right this time!

It’s been well over a year since I last sent out a call for help here @ LISNews. Authors come and authors go, but for almost 10 years LISNews has been a place to keep up on the latest happenings in the library world.

If you’ve ever thought about writing for a collaborative librarian blog, now’s your big chance. There’s no pay, but it’s a good way to get your name out there, and gain the respect and admiration of librarians from across the globe. If that’s not enough, you’ll also gain the enormous sense of well being that comes with helping your fellow librarians stay informed.

The “job” requires only a minimal time commitment, and just some basic knowledge of HTML & Blogging. You can write whenever you have time, and with some restrictions, you can post and write about whatever you want. Some current authors only write a couple times a month, others find the time every day, and most of the rest of our crew fall somewhere in between.

If you’re interested, read below for all the details. Feel free to pass this one along to others who might be interested.

At LISNews you’ll have the ability to talk with literally thousands of people every day. I ask that you don’t abuse this privilege. You can become well known and respected in our field by writing intelligent and thoughtful commentary.

It’s also very important to understand if you post anything even remotely controversial you will also be picked on, abused, and yelled at. This shouldn’t bother you, it happens to all of us, sometimes on a daily basis. You must have thick skin in this game, it comes with the territory. The internet is full of mean and nasty people.

I also expect you to be generally fair with what you post. This is not a place to further your angry agendas, or seek revenge on those who bother you. This doesn’t mean you can’t make your opinions known, but you should do your best to be nice, and back up your opinions with facts. I’m not saying you should avoid controversial topics, nor should you avoid having a point of view, but I do ask that you generally try be fair and friendly. Your posts should bring more insight and information than anger and agenda. What you post should be teachable rather than abusive.

These are obviously subjective ideas, and can be very difficult to get right with controversial topics. You may think what you posted is absolutely true and right, but those who disagree with that point of view will call you unfair, biased, ignorant, or worse.

In short, you need to have the ability to write posts that are well written, informative, interesting, friendly or funny. Everything you write can’t be an angry attack on those who disagree with you. The old cliché is “more light than heat.”

Most of the rules involve keeping my life simple, since I run this site in my spare time, the goal here is to avoid creating extra work and headaches for me, and keep it fun for all of us. Just don’t get me (or you) in any trouble and we’ll all get along just fine. There are just a few simple rules.

1. Don’t put up anything that can get us in any serious (especially legal) trouble.
2. Don’t put up anything that is just an advertisement.
3. Try to follow the style we have been using, there’s not much to it
4. Post at least twice a month

I think you can get a good idea of what stories are acceptable by just looking at the site. Try to keep your posts related to the library world, though not everything will be, feel free to be creative and original. For the most part it’s quite simple, and just takes a few minutes. On average it takes about 2 minutes for me to post a story. Your HTML skills need only be very limited at best, just enough to post an “A HREF” link really.

So, if you’ve read this far you’re probably wondering what you need do to get started!

You need an LISNews account (aka username), and we need to know about you. So either email me or send me an IM with your username and we can talk about LISNews.

I’m happy to answer any questions, but if you choose to reply to me, and we decide you’re right for the super secret and exciting author powers PLEASE do actually post a story. I can’t tell you how many people have said “I do” and were never heard from again. I’d rather never hear from you again NOW rather than after you got me all excited.

Allow me to brag for a moment. I was doing some work on the LISHost stats last night and noticed I could see if LISNews has any impact on the biblioblogosphere. You’re probably familiar with our “Blogs To Read In…” list we’ve done for the past few years, it’s usually one of the most read stories of the year. I’ve always been really curious if being on this list in particular makes any difference to a site, mostly because the list takes so long to put together. I’m generally curious if on any given day a link from LISNews brings in any significant number of readers in general, but this post in particular seems like it should mean something.

So I won’t name the site, but I was pleasantly surprised at what I saw when I took a look at the stats, a big jump in readership. Here’s what I saw on one of the charts:

As you can see there was about a 40%-50% jump in sessions after the list was posted to LISNews. The numbers show an increase of about 300-400 sessions a day, and that has been sustained for several weeks now.

I have no reason to believe this site is representative of all the other sites, but at least I can see someone agreed with at least one of our picks. All the other numbers (hits, pageviews, bandwidth) showed similar jumps, so the site has gained significant readership from being on LISNews.