New blog post from the Scottish Government Library. What we learnt from Internet Librarian International 2012 http://go.cmp.sr/2i
Posted via Composer
Saturday 18 May 2013
Tuesday 2 April 2013
Putting the 'e' in Library
Our small and busy Library team have a clear vision of which services we need to deliver to the Scottish Government, and how to deliver them. So a few years ago we made the decision to focus on delivering desktop access to our services and market the Library as a virtual library.
We developed our Library pages on the organisation's intranet and re-branded it the eLibrary. And we continually describe and promote our Library as an eLibrary.
The eLibrary is continually developing, and now we're taking this to the next level with the launch of the first in a series of eLearning modules.
Readers of this blog may be aware that our Library has been providing links to a range of desktop and mobile information services via our Library on the Web page for almost a year now. So we're delighted to say our eLearning modules will initially be available to anyone on this blog at our new eLearning page.
So visit our eLearning page see our first module - Go Google! Go Google! aims to give you some top tips to help you get the most from your Google searching.
Follow our blog and be the first to see our exciting eLearning developments over the coming months and beyond.
Paul Gray
Friday 26 October 2012
Keeping up with the Library
I previously wrote about what, broadly speaking, my job as a Scottish Government Librarian involves. Over my next few posts I’d like to explain some of the specific things we do in a bit more detail. In this post, it’s the turn of our alerting services.
The Scottish Government Library has always delivered alerting services to Scottish Government staff. Helping staff to keep up-to-date with their subjects seems a very useful thing for the Library to do. However, our experience is that very few staff come to the Library to receive the ‘traditional’ alerts we offer. That’s to say emailed table of contents alerts (via ZETOC) and subject alerts from our subscription bibliographic databases (via EBSCO). We are surveying staff to gain evidence on why that should be. Though what we can say is that staff can set up these alerts for themselves, and may be doing so. We also have an intranet page, our Alerts Centre, where we list a wide range of free alerting services from Google News to Amazon with loads in between. Plus, of course, staff have always used their own ways to keep abreast of their subjects.
However, we feel it’s important that we provide alerting services to staff as we encourage information seeking skills. But we also wish to share our detailed knowledge of the best resources with our staff as there are a number of reasons why staff may not be receiving the information they need.
With this in mind in April 2010 we decided to create a Netvibes page to aggregate the best resources by subject for staff. With the content coming from RSS feeds hand-picked by library staff, as well as encouraging suggestions from SG staff to make the service as relevant as possible. You can read previous posts that mention this work from July 2010 and August 2010.
Over 2 years have passed, so it’s time for an update. Well, we completed our Netvibes page in October 2010 and then asked our colleagues in IT to create a ‘topics’ widget on the corporate Intranet for our aggregated subject feeds. This provided another way we could make our feeds available to staff.
The RSS to email stage of this work I discussed in August 2010 launched in November 2010 with MailChimp. We went for MailChimp as in tests it was much more reliable than Feedburner. So we now offer the aggregated feeds for each subject as a daily email newsletter. Anyone can sign up for the newsletters. Subscribers receive the newsletters at around 5am each morning, though these can be set for any hour and can be sent daily or weekly.
It’s worth saying that this alerting service is entirely delivered by free 3rd part services (Netvibes, the RSS feeds and MailChimp), and with limited staff and financial resources to develop a new service, this seemed a good solution to us.
In fact the only resource required is to routinely check the services are running and deal with any problems. We felt this was acheivable as we already had a staff rota to check links in our Library webpages, and tests showed the services to be reliable. So we simply expanded the rota to cover the Netvibes pages. As for MailChimp, I have each daily newsletter coming to me, with rule moving them into their own folders which enables me to spot when any newsletter hasn’t delivered. This can occassionally happen, and usually resolved by logging into MailChimp and giving the offending newsletter a nudge to send it out.
Given that we’ve used 3rd party tools, the service has continued to prove pretty reliable. In the 2 years it’s been running there have been very few occassions where any of the services have failed. And where they have, it’s been temporary. Often resolved by either sorting themselves out, or sometimes requiring a bit of a kick-start from me.
Of course, from the outset we were careful to be transparent that we were using 3rd party services, and encouraged staff to let us know of any problems – and we would do what we could to fix any problems. But with the disclaimer that we didn’t have complete control over these services.
More than 2 years into this service, we are pleased to say we now have 370 subscribers to our newsletters - some from outwith the Scottish Government. We are happy to make our newsletters and Netvibes page available to anyone. Please do check them out, and if they’re useful, feel free to use them and spread the word.
Paul Gray
The Scottish Government Library has always delivered alerting services to Scottish Government staff. Helping staff to keep up-to-date with their subjects seems a very useful thing for the Library to do. However, our experience is that very few staff come to the Library to receive the ‘traditional’ alerts we offer. That’s to say emailed table of contents alerts (via ZETOC) and subject alerts from our subscription bibliographic databases (via EBSCO). We are surveying staff to gain evidence on why that should be. Though what we can say is that staff can set up these alerts for themselves, and may be doing so. We also have an intranet page, our Alerts Centre, where we list a wide range of free alerting services from Google News to Amazon with loads in between. Plus, of course, staff have always used their own ways to keep abreast of their subjects.
However, we feel it’s important that we provide alerting services to staff as we encourage information seeking skills. But we also wish to share our detailed knowledge of the best resources with our staff as there are a number of reasons why staff may not be receiving the information they need.
With this in mind in April 2010 we decided to create a Netvibes page to aggregate the best resources by subject for staff. With the content coming from RSS feeds hand-picked by library staff, as well as encouraging suggestions from SG staff to make the service as relevant as possible. You can read previous posts that mention this work from July 2010 and August 2010.
Over 2 years have passed, so it’s time for an update. Well, we completed our Netvibes page in October 2010 and then asked our colleagues in IT to create a ‘topics’ widget on the corporate Intranet for our aggregated subject feeds. This provided another way we could make our feeds available to staff.
The RSS to email stage of this work I discussed in August 2010 launched in November 2010 with MailChimp. We went for MailChimp as in tests it was much more reliable than Feedburner. So we now offer the aggregated feeds for each subject as a daily email newsletter. Anyone can sign up for the newsletters. Subscribers receive the newsletters at around 5am each morning, though these can be set for any hour and can be sent daily or weekly.
It’s worth saying that this alerting service is entirely delivered by free 3rd part services (Netvibes, the RSS feeds and MailChimp), and with limited staff and financial resources to develop a new service, this seemed a good solution to us.
In fact the only resource required is to routinely check the services are running and deal with any problems. We felt this was acheivable as we already had a staff rota to check links in our Library webpages, and tests showed the services to be reliable. So we simply expanded the rota to cover the Netvibes pages. As for MailChimp, I have each daily newsletter coming to me, with rule moving them into their own folders which enables me to spot when any newsletter hasn’t delivered. This can occassionally happen, and usually resolved by logging into MailChimp and giving the offending newsletter a nudge to send it out.
Given that we’ve used 3rd party tools, the service has continued to prove pretty reliable. In the 2 years it’s been running there have been very few occassions where any of the services have failed. And where they have, it’s been temporary. Often resolved by either sorting themselves out, or sometimes requiring a bit of a kick-start from me.
Of course, from the outset we were careful to be transparent that we were using 3rd party services, and encouraged staff to let us know of any problems – and we would do what we could to fix any problems. But with the disclaimer that we didn’t have complete control over these services.
More than 2 years into this service, we are pleased to say we now have 370 subscribers to our newsletters - some from outwith the Scottish Government. We are happy to make our newsletters and Netvibes page available to anyone. Please do check them out, and if they’re useful, feel free to use them and spread the word.
Paul Gray
Monday 20 August 2012
The trouble with technology?
Firstly, a bit about me. I’ve a job of two halves. I’m part of our busy enquiries team, and when I’m on the enquiries rota I get to answer the more complex enquiries that requires a librarian’s eye, and conduct research (literature searches) on behalf of Scottish Government staff. But I’m also interested in information literacy – teaching Scottish Government staff to do it for themselves. So I work with Jenny Foreman and the rest of the library team on developing information skills courses and training, which all the librarians in our enquiries team deliver on a training rota. You’ll find links to these course materials on the right of this page or via the menu at the top of this page.
Therefore my job is less about issuing books and more about using technologies to deliver services to our users. In fact, I haven’t issued a book in years and there’s very little I can do in my job that doesn’t involve technology. That’s been a huge shift for me over the last 10 years.
I’d like to talk about that for a bit. ‘Librarian needs technology to do job!’. OK. So far, so what? But what if I tell you I don’t like technology. It’s true. OK. Let me qualify that. I don’t like technology – I like what it can do.
My jobs in libraryland have always been about purpose. I’ve just used the tools available to achieve the purpose as efficiently as possible. As my jobs have changed so have the tools. As I’ve been required to learn the job, I’ve had to discover and learn the right tools to do the job well.
It just so happens that now almost all of these tools are technologies, and increasingly, social media technologies. Nothing I can do about that – they just are. So, I’ve had to find them, learn them, and yes – it’s been in turns easy, difficult, enabling, frustrating, wonderful, time consuming and time saving.
They’ve made it possible for our Library to launch whole new services (check out some at Library on the Web) and they’ve also led me down dead-ends as I hit various workplace IT problems.
The trouble with technology? Technology isn’t always easy. I’ve had to spend time finding and learning every tool I use. But I tell you, we couldn’t have done what we have for our users without it.
Paul Gray
August 13, 2012
Monday 20 June 2011
Google and Beyond. Phil Bradley. Edinburgh. 13/6/11
Here are the most relevant nuggets I gathered from this event.
Google Tips:
Google search stories. Sadly as this is on YouTube, it’s surfcontrolled in my workplace. What we could do (if we ever find a way to show YouTube) is have a rolling course intro page that can play as delegates come in to our courses. Or, it would be great to use in our Internet Skills course. We let the delegates pick their own topic, and ask them to run Google searches on web search, maps, news etc. It’s a way of highlighting that there are different kinds of searches you can do on Google- you aren’t limited to the home page search box. Could be a good lesson for our Google users, and it’ll be a bit fun and different. If only we had YouTube. Damn!!
Google is an advertising company. 97% of its revenue comes from carrying adverts.
Google monitors your search history and will bias future search results accordingly. That’s one reason why everyone’s search results differ.
Google will produce different search results depending on the order in which you type your search terms. You can also promote a search term simply by repeating it.
Use + before a search term to force Google to search on the term as you typed it (You may have noticed Google now automatically ‘corrects’ search terms it thinks you’ve misspelt).
Use ~ before a search term to also search for synonyms.
Apparently Google has been supporting proximity searching for years – but didn’t advertise it. For example ‘Three AROUND(3) mice’ will produce results where the words ‘three’ and ‘mice’ occur within 3 words of each other.
Phil terms Google Advanced Search ‘Simplified Search’, because that’s what it does if you have a complex search.
The new filter for ‘Reading level’ was tested by US teachers categorising hundreds of results. May be useful if you want to just retrieve results for users with low reading ability or children. Otherwise not much use.
Use the ‘Find pages that link to the page’ function to help judge the quality of that page. ie if good quality pages are linking to it, then that’s an indicator the page is of good quality too.
Like Google’s Wonder Wheel (a graphical display of your search results – useful for showing related concepts), Google’s newly launched Image Swirl does the same thing for image searching.
Running a search, then clicking on ‘Related Searches’ (on the left hand column) will produce a list of similar searches you could do.
Define option has now been replaced by the dictionary.
Social Media search engines:
These search for content for social media tools. Socialmention is a good one. Also Who’s Talkin.
Google Realtime. Searches for mentions of your keywords in Twitter and Facebook. Includes a timeline which works better than Twitter’s.
According to Phil, we’ll see more of this as search engines adapt to search content produced by social media tools.
Other Google searches:
Google Discussions. Searches discussion sites like Google Groups, Forums, Flickr groups etc.
Google Squared. Creates a spreadsheet of content. Very new and only seems to work if your search terms are broad enough. A bit rubbish.
Google Custom Search. This has been around for years, but I’ve never got round to seriously thinking about it. Now having thought about it, I think we could use this to good effect in our Library's subject pages. Essentially you’re creating your own Google search engine, where you add a list of websites you want to search. That way you can still offer a Google search to users, but it will only retrieve results from the sites you’ve included. As we already have lists of quality websites we’ve included in our Netvibes pages and our subject pages, it would be a simple matter to take those sites and put them into a Google search. The link to each Google search would be at the top and centre of each subject page.
‘Me on the Web’ is a brand new Google tool that allows you to set up Alerts for mentions of you on the web, plus other resources to help monitor and control your online identity. We can use the Alerts feature within my workplace. But the other resources require at least IE8.
Other search tools:
There is only 4%-10% of overlap between the major search engines. Ranking Thumbshots illustrates this point well.
ixquick and duckduckgo search engines are private in that unlike Google, they don’t keep your search history or monitor your searches.
Addict-o-matic. I kind of like this. It’s a meta search engine that displays results in a dashboard.
Wolfram Alpha is a search engine for facts and figures. And Worldometers is good for global stats.
Quora. A ‘question and answer’ tool that connects to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, thereby enabling you to ask a question to all your Twitter and Facebook followers, and see their questions and answers too.
Flipboard. One to watch. Currently only on iPad, but will be launched on iPhone later this year. It turns your Facebook and Twitter content into a ‘social magazine’ format. If you can’t wait till then, try Pulse News (available on iPad, iPhone and Android).
Use Trunk.ly to get a weekly email listing all the links provided by your followers’ social media accounts. ‘Never forget a link’ is its motto. Think of it as a social bookmarking tool for Twitter, Facebook or any other social media tool.
Lanyrd links to your Twitter followers, looks for mentions of forthcoming events in their Tweets and displays details those forthcoming events in a calendar. Receive updates in a daily email.
Further reading:
Check out Phil’s website and subscribe to Phil’s search blog and his social media blog.
Google Tips:
Google search stories. Sadly as this is on YouTube, it’s surfcontrolled in my workplace. What we could do (if we ever find a way to show YouTube) is have a rolling course intro page that can play as delegates come in to our courses. Or, it would be great to use in our Internet Skills course. We let the delegates pick their own topic, and ask them to run Google searches on web search, maps, news etc. It’s a way of highlighting that there are different kinds of searches you can do on Google- you aren’t limited to the home page search box. Could be a good lesson for our Google users, and it’ll be a bit fun and different. If only we had YouTube. Damn!!
Google is an advertising company. 97% of its revenue comes from carrying adverts.
Google monitors your search history and will bias future search results accordingly. That’s one reason why everyone’s search results differ.
Google will produce different search results depending on the order in which you type your search terms. You can also promote a search term simply by repeating it.
Use + before a search term to force Google to search on the term as you typed it (You may have noticed Google now automatically ‘corrects’ search terms it thinks you’ve misspelt).
Use ~ before a search term to also search for synonyms.
Apparently Google has been supporting proximity searching for years – but didn’t advertise it. For example ‘Three AROUND(3) mice’ will produce results where the words ‘three’ and ‘mice’ occur within 3 words of each other.
Phil terms Google Advanced Search ‘Simplified Search’, because that’s what it does if you have a complex search.
The new filter for ‘Reading level’ was tested by US teachers categorising hundreds of results. May be useful if you want to just retrieve results for users with low reading ability or children. Otherwise not much use.
Use the ‘Find pages that link to the page’ function to help judge the quality of that page. ie if good quality pages are linking to it, then that’s an indicator the page is of good quality too.
Like Google’s Wonder Wheel (a graphical display of your search results – useful for showing related concepts), Google’s newly launched Image Swirl does the same thing for image searching.
Running a search, then clicking on ‘Related Searches’ (on the left hand column) will produce a list of similar searches you could do.
Define option has now been replaced by the dictionary.
Social Media search engines:
These search for content for social media tools. Socialmention is a good one. Also Who’s Talkin.
Google Realtime. Searches for mentions of your keywords in Twitter and Facebook. Includes a timeline which works better than Twitter’s.
According to Phil, we’ll see more of this as search engines adapt to search content produced by social media tools.
Other Google searches:
Google Discussions. Searches discussion sites like Google Groups, Forums, Flickr groups etc.
Google Squared. Creates a spreadsheet of content. Very new and only seems to work if your search terms are broad enough. A bit rubbish.
Google Custom Search. This has been around for years, but I’ve never got round to seriously thinking about it. Now having thought about it, I think we could use this to good effect in our Library's subject pages. Essentially you’re creating your own Google search engine, where you add a list of websites you want to search. That way you can still offer a Google search to users, but it will only retrieve results from the sites you’ve included. As we already have lists of quality websites we’ve included in our Netvibes pages and our subject pages, it would be a simple matter to take those sites and put them into a Google search. The link to each Google search would be at the top and centre of each subject page.
‘Me on the Web’ is a brand new Google tool that allows you to set up Alerts for mentions of you on the web, plus other resources to help monitor and control your online identity. We can use the Alerts feature within my workplace. But the other resources require at least IE8.
Other search tools:
There is only 4%-10% of overlap between the major search engines. Ranking Thumbshots illustrates this point well.
ixquick and duckduckgo search engines are private in that unlike Google, they don’t keep your search history or monitor your searches.
Addict-o-matic. I kind of like this. It’s a meta search engine that displays results in a dashboard.
Wolfram Alpha is a search engine for facts and figures. And Worldometers is good for global stats.
Quora. A ‘question and answer’ tool that connects to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, thereby enabling you to ask a question to all your Twitter and Facebook followers, and see their questions and answers too.
Flipboard. One to watch. Currently only on iPad, but will be launched on iPhone later this year. It turns your Facebook and Twitter content into a ‘social magazine’ format. If you can’t wait till then, try Pulse News (available on iPad, iPhone and Android).
Use Trunk.ly to get a weekly email listing all the links provided by your followers’ social media accounts. ‘Never forget a link’ is its motto. Think of it as a social bookmarking tool for Twitter, Facebook or any other social media tool.
Lanyrd links to your Twitter followers, looks for mentions of forthcoming events in their Tweets and displays details those forthcoming events in a calendar. Receive updates in a daily email.
Further reading:
Check out Phil’s website and subscribe to Phil’s search blog and his social media blog.
Sunday 8 August 2010
Library Day in the Life - round 5
This is my contribution to round 5 of the Library Day in the Life project. But rather than a day in my life, what follows is more a round-up of what this Scottish Government Librarian has been up to in the last week.
This year the Scottish Government Library was at last able to secure accommodation in one of our key offices - Victoria Quay in Edinburgh. So I'm now working peripatetically between two sites. This week, working 3 days at our office in Saughton House, Edinburgh and 2 at Victoria Quay.
So. What's a week in the life of this Government librarian like? I'm part of an 5 strong enquiry team, which shares the enquiries desk on a daily rota. Of course, this is great as I never know what I'm going to get. Although in truth many requests are for copies of publications, which our super-efficient Library Assistant answers usually within 15 minutes. Though I had my share of more detailed enquiries this week which ranged from a member of the public requesting copies of responses to a fairly old consultation conducted by the Scottish Government on regulations for milk quotas for farms in southern Scotland, to finding a copy of the consolidated version of the Railways Act (1993). On average over the past three months 4.4% of our requests came from members of the public.
As part of my job I also conduct literature searches. These are varied, often interesting and topical. For example, this week I conducted literature searches across a wide range of subscription databases (beat that, Google!) on:
Flexible staff resourcing
Imaginary companions in adults
Decriminalisation of drugs
Can't resist the swipe at Google, but I mention it because one of the requesters for one of these searches had searched Google and came to us when he found very little. Some carefully built search strategies and considered choosing of databases soon revealed quite a few 'spot on' publications he hadn't found on Google.
This leads me onto my information literacy work, which largely involves me co-writing and co-delivering information skills training for Scottish Government staff.
Our training is part of the course programme for the whole organisation. With the next programme running from October to March, I'm involved with other team members in pulling our library programme together. This week myself and my boss had an initial discussion sketching out the programme. With growing waiting lists for our courses (which is quite flattering) the discussion led onto our desire to deliver our training as elearning packages so all Scottish Government staff can access our courses on their desktops. Probably via Moodle. This is something we really want to do urgently. But to do it well will take some time.
Incidentally, anyone can see our training materials here.
This week also saw me complete a stage of a big project I'm managing, and all of us in team are working on, to create a subject based library of RSS feeds via Netvibes for Scottish Government staff. Or in fact, anyone who would find it useful. It's still in development, but you'll find the completed Government through to Planning and Building pages here.
Particular challenges the project threw up this week had me scratching my head over why some EBSCOhost RSS feeds appear to break after a while, and considering the merits of RSS to email services offered by Feedburner and MailChimp.
Yes. RSS to email. The irony of having folk check in on a Netvibes page to see results of RSS feeds hasn't escaped me, so part of this project is to offer an RSS to email subscription service. Which you can also try out right now on our Netvibes page if you wish.
And that, is a week in the life of a Scottish Government librarian.
This year the Scottish Government Library was at last able to secure accommodation in one of our key offices - Victoria Quay in Edinburgh. So I'm now working peripatetically between two sites. This week, working 3 days at our office in Saughton House, Edinburgh and 2 at Victoria Quay.
So. What's a week in the life of this Government librarian like? I'm part of an 5 strong enquiry team, which shares the enquiries desk on a daily rota. Of course, this is great as I never know what I'm going to get. Although in truth many requests are for copies of publications, which our super-efficient Library Assistant answers usually within 15 minutes. Though I had my share of more detailed enquiries this week which ranged from a member of the public requesting copies of responses to a fairly old consultation conducted by the Scottish Government on regulations for milk quotas for farms in southern Scotland, to finding a copy of the consolidated version of the Railways Act (1993). On average over the past three months 4.4% of our requests came from members of the public.
As part of my job I also conduct literature searches. These are varied, often interesting and topical. For example, this week I conducted literature searches across a wide range of subscription databases (beat that, Google!) on:
Flexible staff resourcing
Imaginary companions in adults
Decriminalisation of drugs
Can't resist the swipe at Google, but I mention it because one of the requesters for one of these searches had searched Google and came to us when he found very little. Some carefully built search strategies and considered choosing of databases soon revealed quite a few 'spot on' publications he hadn't found on Google.
This leads me onto my information literacy work, which largely involves me co-writing and co-delivering information skills training for Scottish Government staff.
Our training is part of the course programme for the whole organisation. With the next programme running from October to March, I'm involved with other team members in pulling our library programme together. This week myself and my boss had an initial discussion sketching out the programme. With growing waiting lists for our courses (which is quite flattering) the discussion led onto our desire to deliver our training as elearning packages so all Scottish Government staff can access our courses on their desktops. Probably via Moodle. This is something we really want to do urgently. But to do it well will take some time.
Incidentally, anyone can see our training materials here.
This week also saw me complete a stage of a big project I'm managing, and all of us in team are working on, to create a subject based library of RSS feeds via Netvibes for Scottish Government staff. Or in fact, anyone who would find it useful. It's still in development, but you'll find the completed Government through to Planning and Building pages here.
Particular challenges the project threw up this week had me scratching my head over why some EBSCOhost RSS feeds appear to break after a while, and considering the merits of RSS to email services offered by Feedburner and MailChimp.
Yes. RSS to email. The irony of having folk check in on a Netvibes page to see results of RSS feeds hasn't escaped me, so part of this project is to offer an RSS to email subscription service. Which you can also try out right now on our Netvibes page if you wish.
And that, is a week in the life of a Scottish Government librarian.
Friday 2 July 2010
What on Earth have I been doing?
I've been doing some tidying up on my holidays. I have. And look what I found down the back of my sofa. Only my blog! So apologies for being so rubbish at updating, but here we go...
It's been a busy old time since I last wrote. The thing that has been foremost in my mind about my work is the spectre of public sector cuts. Next year could see changes to what I do. The thing I do most and seems to carry most kudos is the Internet skills training I write and deliver with my colleagues. The value of the other information services I and my colleagues supply seems only to be fully appreciated by our customers, in the most part. My point is training seems to be the way to go. And that will evolve. We'll do differently. Change emphasis. Produce eLearning packages. But there is an understanding that information literacy skills are needed.
So, I look forward to continue co-writing and co-delivering our various Internet skills packages (also available for all to see at http://sglibraryservices.wordpress.com/ generous, sharing, publicly funded types that we are). I suspect I'll be helping to do a fair bit of updating over the next few months.
Then there's newspapers. Staff in the Scottish Government buy print newspapers. Lots of newspapers. For much of the past year we seem to have been chasing various online news options as a more cost-effective alternative. But with News International and now other publishers wanting money for individual online access, and the likes of LexisNexis charging more than we can afford with our budgetary contraints, it's proving to be a real challenge. I wonder how other libraries (public libraries excepted) are providing news. Are we all just encouraging users to go on Google News? Which I see has just had a makeover, incidentally.
On a more positive note last year I spent sometime with a colleague giving our 'Alerts Centre' an overhaul. It's a one-stop-shop for Scottish Government staff offering advice on how to keep up-to-date on their subject areas. Job done. I thought 'right then, now we really must do something to encourage staff to use RSS'. RSS is something covered in our Web 2.0 Workshop and is a new, even strange concept to most course attendees. All of whom are Scottish Government or Agency staff.
I'm really pleased that the idea enjoyed alot of support from colleagues and I ran with it until I ended up building a Netvibes page to include RSS feeds by subject. Having demonstrated a draft version on 26/4 and 8/6 to colleagues, this was given the go ahead and we're now at the stage of populating the various subject tabs. Check it out if so inclined at http://www.netvibes.com/sglibraryservices.
I did come across some really good examples of organisations offering RSS feeds via Netvibes which helped alot when developing ours. Not least Shrewsbury and Telford Health Libraries: Team Knowledge Update. See http://www.netvibes.com/sathlibraries.
If only I can get Google Analytics to work (it did on the test tabs I had running!) I'd be a very smiley chap. I hope Analytics is just being slow at producing the first statistics.
It's been a busy old time since I last wrote. The thing that has been foremost in my mind about my work is the spectre of public sector cuts. Next year could see changes to what I do. The thing I do most and seems to carry most kudos is the Internet skills training I write and deliver with my colleagues. The value of the other information services I and my colleagues supply seems only to be fully appreciated by our customers, in the most part. My point is training seems to be the way to go. And that will evolve. We'll do differently. Change emphasis. Produce eLearning packages. But there is an understanding that information literacy skills are needed.
So, I look forward to continue co-writing and co-delivering our various Internet skills packages (also available for all to see at http://sglibraryservices.wordpress.com/ generous, sharing, publicly funded types that we are). I suspect I'll be helping to do a fair bit of updating over the next few months.
Then there's newspapers. Staff in the Scottish Government buy print newspapers. Lots of newspapers. For much of the past year we seem to have been chasing various online news options as a more cost-effective alternative. But with News International and now other publishers wanting money for individual online access, and the likes of LexisNexis charging more than we can afford with our budgetary contraints, it's proving to be a real challenge. I wonder how other libraries (public libraries excepted) are providing news. Are we all just encouraging users to go on Google News? Which I see has just had a makeover, incidentally.
On a more positive note last year I spent sometime with a colleague giving our 'Alerts Centre' an overhaul. It's a one-stop-shop for Scottish Government staff offering advice on how to keep up-to-date on their subject areas. Job done. I thought 'right then, now we really must do something to encourage staff to use RSS'. RSS is something covered in our Web 2.0 Workshop and is a new, even strange concept to most course attendees. All of whom are Scottish Government or Agency staff.
I'm really pleased that the idea enjoyed alot of support from colleagues and I ran with it until I ended up building a Netvibes page to include RSS feeds by subject. Having demonstrated a draft version on 26/4 and 8/6 to colleagues, this was given the go ahead and we're now at the stage of populating the various subject tabs. Check it out if so inclined at http://www.netvibes.com/sglibraryservices.
I did come across some really good examples of organisations offering RSS feeds via Netvibes which helped alot when developing ours. Not least Shrewsbury and Telford Health Libraries: Team Knowledge Update. See http://www.netvibes.com/sathlibraries.
If only I can get Google Analytics to work (it did on the test tabs I had running!) I'd be a very smiley chap. I hope Analytics is just being slow at producing the first statistics.
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