Monitoring What Students Are Saying About the Library in their Blogs – A How To Guide

Here’s a tip for Academic Librarians:
Inspired by Rob Hudson’s article, Law Students Write About Law Libraries (or, What Students Really Think: A Survey of Student Blawgs)*, I thought that someone should be monitoring what our law students bloggers are saying about the law library.
Since I don’t want to read every post (especially those about trips to the local tavern, etc.), I figured out a simple way to just subscribe to those posts in which the library was mentioned. Here’s what I did:

  • First, check the list of Law Student blogs by university compiled by Clever WoT. Make a note of the URL.
  • Then, go to the Google Blog Search advance search page. In the “with at least one of the words” box, enter the words “library” and “librarian” (or whatever terms you choose). In the “at the URL” box, enter in the URL of the law student blog. Run the search.
  • In the search results page, see the “subscribe” section on the left. Add the RSS or Atom feed to your aggregator and you are all set.
  • Repeat for each our your law students’ blogs.

Of course this works for faculty blogs, too.
* To learn more about Rob Hudson’s research, you can watch his presentation at CALI via Apreso.


Update:
Mike Schramm over at WisPolitics had a great follow up tip:

At www.feedjumbler.com, you can enter in multiple feeds and the site will publish them as one. So you could get the individual search feeds, enter them in at feedjumbler, then give that single feed to anyone else in the library system who might be interested.

Thanks, Mike!