Libraries and weblogs: The Role of new phenomenon Blogs in library services, research and learning in libraries
Tahereh Karami & Tahereh Oloumi
Abstract
Weblogs, or blogs for short, are a cross between a diary, and an online community that are built using specially designed software that makes creating and updating a web site quick and easy. More recently there has been a surge in the number of professional blogs. How librarians can utilize weblogs for their profession? Potentially, blogs have applications in libraries: as a current awareness service; to highlight news or resources of interest; to post book reviews from students, faculty, and staff members; to list new acquisitions; to announce library news and events. Using of systems such as RSS technology is another blog application in libraries for selective dissemination of information. Blogs like any web page, but if you want to monitor many it can be easier to make use of newsfeeds to access them. These use RSS (RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) technology. This is an XML tag for a page that allows the content or headlines of a weblog to be pulled automatically into other web pages. The best topic-oriented blogs contain useful posts that will help their readers to keep up to date on the issues. Some weblogs, particularly those created by subject experts, have emerged as authoritative sources of current information and opinion in their field. Not only are many information weblogs actually created by subject experts, but they also often attract the participation of other experts through a "comment" facility. The following weblogs are useful as sources of current professional information for librarians. This paper discusses different questions of weblogs in libraries. It is focusing on three questions: How can the weblog improve library services? How can the weblogs support researches in libraries?, What are the informational benefits of weblogs and their sections as RSS in libraries?
Keywords: Weblog, Blog, libraries, librarian, Research, Library and information science
The 27th Annual Conference: Embedding Libraries in Learning and Research. Porto, Portugal, May 22-25, 2006. http://paginas.fe.up.pt/~iatu2006/authors6.html