More Evangelizing about News Aggregators.
Rejoice – it’s here! Steven Cohen’s article about RSS For Non-Techie Librarians is now available on LLRX. It should actually be called “News Aggregators for Non-Techie Librarians” because it illustrates how using an aggregator (Newzcrawler specifically, but the concept in general) can make librarians more efficient. (And really, the benefits would apply to anyone that is active on the web, so don’t think this is just for librarians.)
“In order to keep current, like many librarians I had all of the web sites that I visited daily bookmarked (about 50) in my browser at work and I would painstakingly visit each site throughout the day. Of course there were days that visiting each site was not possible (on very busy days I was lucky to get to one). And if three days went by without reading these favorites, I would get too bogged down trying to catch up. This was all before I was introduced to the wonderful world of RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds. Now, I get almost all of the content I want from all of these sites delivered to one place as soon as the site is updated, saving precious time. The most amazing part is that I am notified when any of the sites I subscribe to are updated within minutes. And I didn’t have to be an experienced techie to set-it-up.”
I’ve been waiting for this article to arrive so that I can start using it as a handout. If you’re not using a news aggregator, Steven will show you why you should be. It will also help you understand why I think some form of RSS news aggregation will play a major part of our information lives in the future.
Great job, Steven!
[The Shifted Librarian]