Monday, February 14, 2005

Library Daydreams....

...is the name of a post to a blog called "iBeth: everyday reflections of an academic mom." It's a longish post about internet features she'd like to see added to her library's environment. Worth reading for the non-librarian's view of what's useful--and also because Beth is an engaging writer from a world close to ours (and if you have small kids, the same world!)

And there have been lively discussions in several places (also on the Web4Lib listserv) about the value of RSS, and peoples' perceived preferences for getting updates (RSS or email?). Beth offers her view in the post linked to above: "Anyway, what I've been daydreaming about is the ability to export a list of books I've checked out so that it could be put on my university website and automatically be updated--sort of like Bloglines maintains my blogroll. A "currently reading" list on my university website would help communicate my current research interests. I guess I can do this via allconsuming.net (still need to check out that site, recommended by Mel earlier), but it would be neat to do it through my own library."

Which I think is what Peter Rukavina did back in August for himself and which we blogged.

There's been a fair bit of "regular" press about Answers.com which bills itself as "The best definitions and explanations for over 1 million topics." And certainly the author of this Forbes article thinks it is the "best internet innovation in years." For fact-based searching, this may be the case. Did you notice the tagline in the top right corner? "The New Standard in Reference." How interesting. And so is this.

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