Plunging into the library mashine
There is a lot of interesting content shared by library technologists in blogs like this, and sometimes is difficult to cope with all this information overload. Feeds readers like Google Reader help to perform this task but often there’s no enough time to manually browse all the new posts trying to find what interests us.
There are tools that can automate most of this browsing, like Yahoo! Pipes.
Yahoo! Pipes is a graphical tool that allows to mash-up different data sources, like RSS feeds, filter and combine them to create new and personalized feeds. There’s plenty of mashups created and shared by users that can be used and also mixed. A little browsing brought me to a list of library pipes related with technology, some of them filtering RSS feeds from library technology blogs.
I took this three as a base to create mine, Searchable Library Technology RSS Feed Combiner, Library-N-Tech and Libraries & Technology. Yahoo! Pipes has quite a lot of possibilities, but basically this is what my pipe is doing. We start from a list of the feeds we want to take into consideration. Then we apply some filter into the keywords or the description of the posts, like that contains some words: “discovery tools”, “mashup” or “dublin core” for instance. And finally order them by publication date. And that’s it! A new feed with posts talking about what we care about.
So, set your criteria and let the Library Mashine do the work!
The library mashine feed is now published!
About this post
This post was first published on LibTechNotes, a blog from the Library team at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya to share our everyday findings, solutions and inspirations.
