Computers in Libraries:

The Computers in Libraries Conference with its corollary, Internet@Schools East in Washington, D.C. is in its 23rd year. Planned to coordinate with the marvel of cherry blossoms in bloom, this conference offered resources and ideas for us to implement with our home libraries. Some of the time, I have to confess, I proudly noted: we already do that in Uniondale! And we've gone even further down that particular path! Other times I was furiously taking notes, capturing as much as I could to bring back to all of you.

I'm going to share with you some of my favorite newly discovered gems, together with the name of the workshop I attended. Hope you find this useful!

RSS@Schools

Steven Cohen is a law librarian in Huntington who probably has the marketshare on RSS feeds. He has a daunting 900 or so and must have given up any semblance of a life to read even a little bit of each. In any case, why RSS? I know we've talked about the reasons to let RSS into our library lives--the ability to bring all our best-loved sites into one place precludes the annoyance of having to search for them--and remembering to do so! As librarians, posting feeds on our websites for students and teachers could be particularly helpful.

A few familiar and new gems, in no particular order:

For gathering your feeds--Google Reader http://reader.google.com/

Search library feeds--http://www.libworm.com/

Open archive for library and information science--E-Lis http://eprints.rclis.org/

Track bills, issues, members in Congress--Open Congress http://www.opencongress.org/

Voters database in Congress http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/

Monitor changes to webpages http://watchthatpage.com/

Create feed for a webpage http://page2rss.com/

Highlight quote on page and go directly to that passage--very cool and worth a try! CiteBite http://www.citebite.com/ I created an example for you here: http://pages.citebite.com/q4u0q6q1ewsx

A lot of databases have rss feeds, most notably EBSCO. Check them out.

Steven Cohen has a lot to say on his librarystuff.net blog.