mamamusings

internet librarian: notess on "harvesting blogs"

Points out that we’re still in a “hunting and gathering” mode; there’s no comprehensive, accurate search.

Strategies:

• Do “collection development” to find key weblogs in your area
• Search weblog/rss search engines for both broad and specific content areas
• Wander occasionally; follow “what I read” links, comments, trackbacks

Oh my goodness…he’s showing an RIT student’s post on LexisNexis. Pretty entertaining. “I never realized that RIT’s library bought access to LexisNexis and any RIT student can log in and do searches for free.” I’m delighted that the student is blogging, and that he found and appreciated the library content—but disappointed that our students don’t all know about these resources. This speaks to a need for better, more targeted marketing by our library (and I know they’re not the only ones).

He mentions and demos a lot of blog search tools, some of which were new to me. I also didn’t realize that Micah Alpern’s “trusted blog search” tool could search blogrolling.com blogrolls now.

Final points, which I may use to start my presentation:

• Be aware of blog movement
• Not always necessary
• More useful in some fields than others
• Blogs constantly changing
• One of the “hot” technologies

(What happens if we roll back the clock ten years, and substitute “web” for “blog”? Or much further back, and substitute “book” for “blog”?)

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