Tuesday, May 26, 2009

"Well, I'm back."

Returning for another round of Learning 2.0 ... so on to Thing 24:

After signing up for a couple of the tracking services, I quickly found I needed to refine my searches a bit more. For example, in the Bloglines citation search, I had to refine it to filter out some Library Elf feeds. Abbreviating my library's name in the Twitter Search turned out to not be so useful; there are just too many other uses of "LCL". I may need to play around with that one a bit more, since spelling the whole thing out has yet to retrieve anything useful.

Google Alerts came up with a couple of items, including a mention of Library storytimes in a local newspaper article, but nothing really calling for a response.

The Bloglines citation search took a few days to turn up anything, but eventually several posts showed up, including a link on a Readers Advisory-themed blog to one of our RA resources, a post on a blog by the daughter of one of our staff members (linking to one of our pages that featured the blogger's mother), and a lament from another blogger about how limited our hours are (while acknowledging the budgetary restraints we are under). I responded to this last post, but so far there's been no comment back (and I don't know that I'd necessarily expect one in this case).

FairShare seems like it should have the potential to be extremely useful, but it needs some refinement. As NLC staff found, it mainly showed other sites that have posted similar content to that on some of our pages (such as a list of New York Times bestsellers) rather than content that was actually taken from our site. Still, this one is worth keeping an eye on, as inappropriately reused content is something that has been a problem for us from time to time.