The Role of Libraries

I was excited to read John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill and Cindi Trainor's thoughts about the role of libraries in The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians. You or I might not agree with everything they say but I think libraries are facing radical changes in the coming decade (or less?) and it's fantastic to see the debate being carried out in public.

If we can get some perspective on the fundamental role of libraries then we can really start focussing our time and resources on the most important aspects of libraries and librarianship.

I wrote a short post about the statements on the RISG blog.

RSS 4 Libraries

Here is the presentation I recently gave at the Reference @ the Metcalfe Seminar about using RSS feeds in Libraries. It covered three areas - professional development, connecting with your community and syndicating content on your web site.

I tried to demystify RSS and show people that it's very easy to get started using this technology. It's a relatively simple, time saving tool non-techies.

RSS At Your Library

View more presentations from Martin.

RSS is only a starting point. As libraries start employing staff with a few more technical skills (programmers, developers, etc.) we can start taking advantage of all the data that's available and growing in the cloud. If you want to see a glimpse of this type of what this might look like have a look at Paul Hagon's slides from his talk at the seminar. He gave a fascinating talk about how he's combining the data from the National Library with the services and APIs available from online services like del.icio.us and Flickr to create exciting new ways for users to discover the NLA collections.