The Shifted Librarian on Shared Subscription Lists
The Shifted Librarian points to two services that rank blog posts and things aggregator users subscribe to based on different criteria. She requests that librarians participate in Dave Winer’s Share Your OPML project so that we can get a critical mass of feeds librarians subscribe to.
It got me wondering about the utility of a list of the top feeds certain professions subscribe to instead of just a list of the top feeds by subject. I realize this is very complicated for a number of reasons, like just the number of professions or how to categorize someone’s profession. (Does a hospital librarian work in the medical field or librarianship? Maybe there’s a way to indicate both.) But it seems like it would be valuable to see a list of feeds librarians subscribe to, as opposed to the top feeds about librarianship. Business school librarians, for example, may subscribe to a number of business sources, but not very many librarian feeds. It may be more useful for someone else in a business library–maybe someone who just started using an aggregator or someone who’s new to a position–to see what feeds his colleagues subscribe to instead of viewing the top feeds about librarianship.
I tend to aggree with Jenny’s last line: “A year from now, I think we’ll look back and recognize that 2004 was a year of evolutionary change for aggregators.” Isn’t it exciting to think that we still have 350-some days in 2004 to continue to play with aggregators and aggregation?
January 15th, 2004 at 10:59 am
This is exactly was has been bugging me about the idea of a “definitive” librarian aggregator subscription list. Looking at the subscription lists for other librarians on feeds.scripting.com, I have noticed that our “reading interests” are all very different; the overlap is quite small.
I like the idea of feeds by subject, but I think that it is difficult to say that certain sites are what librarians are (or should be) reading. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this.