S401 Bloglines

I wanted to write on an interesting feed I had from The New York Times-books RSS feed.  The articles was called "Library Science," and talked about Marilyn Johnson's new book This Book is Overdue which explored different aspects of being a librarian by looking at all differt types of various unexpected librarians.  I think this was a great article to read as a future librarian because it reminds me that I don't have to think of my future as only sitting behind a desk or reshelving books.  There a thousand different options out there right now, and I can invent any way to use my skills that I can image.  I'm really glad that Bloglines led me to this article, and I hope that other people who read it, who are not librarians, have more appreciation for them.  Johnson says that she thinks librarians are interesting becasue we make sure that the world's knowledge is preserved and continually resurrected and remembered.  I had never thought of my job that way, but I see that she makes a very good point.  No matter if I am looking through a card catalogue to help a patron and surfing the internet to try to find the answer to an very elusive question a partron is having trouble with, I am doing the exact same thing.  Librarians are doing their best to give all people access to information and make sure that we save everything important so now in the future, everyone will be able to answer their questions and continue learning for their whole lives.

S401 Bloglines-News

I absolutely hate watching the news, and I'm not a big fan of sitting down and reading a newspaper either.  When I found I was able to access news stories on Blogline, I assumed that I would feel the same way, I would not really be interested in taking the time to sit there and scan through the news.  However, I have to say that, while I'm not in love with it, reading the news via bloglines is a welcome change to the other two methods.  It may be because I'm so used to using the internet, but I found it  much more convenient to just scroll through the stories and quickly decide what I did or did not want to take the time to read.  My two favorite RSS feed news sites that I found were BBC News and USA Today Books.  The BBC news was nice for getting stories about things all over the world, which I must prefer to something like a local newspaper where the majority of the stories focus only on the town and the immediately surrounding areras.  And even though I've always been a big fan of books, I didn't really expect to like the USA Today site; I had just never been interested in reading news stories about books-I wanted to read the book itself.  However, I think I am a convert becasue I really found many of the articles interesting, especially the article about how there is predicted to be a surge in the books that are plays on classic tales, like the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did with Pride and Prejudice, which by the way, I wish they would leave classic tales alone.  Nevertheless, I am happy to report that the news RSS feeds were a welcome addition to my online time.

S401 Bloglines

I have never used an RSS feed before, in fact I didn't know what it was until abou a week ago.  However, using Bloglines as a way to get feeds from all different sources was fairly easy and a convenient way to organize information you're specifically interested in.  I would say the hardest part is finding blogs that update regularly.  None of the blogs I subscribed to did any postings this week, but I assume that I will see something from them soon.  I have a few friends that blog, and their posts are usually pretty sporadic.  I wasn't aware that there were so many different blogs by librarians actually about being a librarian.  I think using Bloglines is a good way for new librarians to read the blogs of experienced librarians and get a glimpse into what the job is all about.  I found that the main advantage of using Bloglines is that they are able to make a very specialized internet for you.  It's kind of like if you were able to tell a newspaper what you wanted to read about (for me it would be about nature and animals), and then they send a newspaper to you all filled with stories on the things you're interested in.  If more people knew about this site, I bet they would love being able to have information from all their favorite sites all collected for them and ready for them to explore when they have time-I know I do!