Blogging and Beyond: New Communication Streams for Technical Services Librarians

I’ll be heading to New Orleans later this week for the American Association of Law Libraries Annual Meeting. One of the things on my calendar is presenting at a TS-SIS program entitled, Blogging and Beyond: New Communication Streams for Technical Services Librarians.
I’ll be talking about blogs and RSS – specifically how they can be used for technical services applications, such as cataloging, acquisitions, and collection development. I’ll also be demonstrating how to use a RSS reader like Bloglines, as well as, how to subscribe to RSS feeds through email programs like Outlook. I posted my PowerPoint slides over at Scribd.
As a reference librarian, I found that it was very interesting to look at this technology from a different perspective. Of course blogs and RSS are great for research, but librarians can also use them to stay current with new cataloging standards, find out about new books and track prices, monitor journal publication schedules, and much more. Some tech services librarians are also discovering how to output feeds from their library catalogs.