Baruch's reference blog

I am really pleased with the way that our library's reference blog, Reference at Newman Library, has continued to thrive after being launched four years ago. We've now posted over 1300 messages (and hundreds of comments, too); our weekly average is about a dozen posts.

When we started the blog, it was intended to do away with the informal and haphazard systems we had to notify each other at the desk of technical problems and to alert each other to new resources and tools. We had been using:

• notes taped to the desk
• a printed reference manual in a 3-ring binder, which is now replaced by our password-protected reference wiki (screenshots)
• emails on internal listservs
• word-of-mouth (i.e., tell the person coming on after you at the desk what to watch out for)

With the blog, we made all that great content easy to publish, easy to share, and easy to find again later. Since most of my colleagues don't like using feed readers to keep up with RSS feeds, I set up a system to forward every post to them via email as soon as the posts are published.

Since we started our blog in Blogger in the days long ago when the service did not offer categories or tags, I've been relying on a del.icio.us account I created to tag all the posts and give multiple entry points back to the content. Every time there's a new post, I tag it in del.icio.us. A link to the del.icio.us index can be found on right column of the blog, allowing my colleagues to scan the subjects covered already on blog posts. There's also a search box, which I hear gets pounded a lot by the staff trying to track down content they recall having seen.

Over time, the blog has turned into a repository of reference question and answer pairs. We often post stumpers to the blog or notable reference questions tied to assignments, which lately have been leading to more and more comments and suggestions from librarians. It's kinda interesting that if you Google Apple audited financial data the first hit is a post from our blog about what database to use to find this information.

As someone who started working at Baruch's library as an adjunct, I know how out of the loop you can feel when you miss out on staff meetings and informal conversations during the workday. A number of the adjuncts have mentioned to me that the blog (and the wiki) are invaluable to them for finding out about things that they might not have otherwise heard of.

Now if only I could convince my colleagues to use Bloglines or Google Reader to keep up with posts from the reference blog (as well as others they might enjoy)...

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What I write on Twitter

In case you were curious, here is what I use my Twitter account to talk about.

Podcasts I like

I recently added to the LIS Wiki a page with a list of podcasts that I listen to on my commute (a system that is for me a great way to learn when I am physically prevented from reading). Not all the podcasts are strictly by or for library staff (especially Jon Udell's) but all are highly recommended. My hats are off to the folks who make these podcasts for helping me to keep current.

Photo: " Radio station manager. [[African American Sargeant Julius C. McKenzie, Station Manag...] (December 1947)." New York Public Library. http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1260303

Adding semantic web metadata to your blog posts

Lately, I've been interested in fooling around with semantic web technology and am intrigued by the Calais service that Reuters recently made available. As far as I can tell, one of the services that Calais will be able to provide is to automatically encode RDF metadata into your content. I was hoping to RDFify my blog posts, but upon getting started with setting up the Calais service I quickly realized that I was in over my head. The sign-up form for the API asks me "What is your prefered protocol? REST? SOAP? XML-RPC? JSON-RPC?" I'll be durned if I know.

For the fun of it, I did paste the text of a blog post into the Calais Viewer, which will then attach RDF metadata to your content (but it doesn't publish it for you, it just shows it to you as an example of what Calais can do). Here's a screenshot of what it did. Note the columns of automatically generated metadata on the side of the page: Facility, Industry Term, Person, URL.

Is there anyone reading my blog who can offer some advice about whether I can set things up with my blog so that the Calais enriched posts are available?

FYI: I first heard about Calais on this Talking with Talis podcast from March 11, 2008.