Family Man Librarian

I have a lot of guilt and I’m not even Catholic…One of the things I feel guilty about is not posting more often and more regularly on this blog. It’s not for lack of things to write about, that’s for sure. I am just trying to catch my breath most days. There is so much to do, so little time (how unoriginal of me to write that, but it’s true). I have been preoccupied with many interesting yet stressful things. One of them is MetaLib training. For those who aren’t familiar with this product, let me just say that it is an example of a metasearching tool, sometimes also known as federated search. My library is part of a consortium that purchased this software in a package along with an integrated library system called Aleph 500, and a context-sensitive linking software called SFX. MetaLib is really cool and this kind of tool can help libraries like mine to offer a much more user-friendly way to find information for our users.While thinking of MetaLib and the issues of metasearching (or federated searching), I was reminded of the fact that I created a pretty barebones webliography of articles, reports, etc. on this topic here. I originally created this webliography as a companion tool for a presentation at last year’s NASIG conference, and have had several requests from people who want to share it with others, link to it, whatever. This a.m. as I was watching the kids while Michele went to her MOPS meeting, I was thinking that I desperately need to update that webliography. I have saved over 100 additional article citations in RefWorks (another neat new e-resource that I have purchased for our library users) and I need to figure out a time to look through them all and select those that I want to add into the webliography. Then, lo and behold, one thought led to another, and I had a “Doh!” kind of moment: Why don’t I reformat the webliography so that I can offer it as an RSS feed? That way, anyone who wants to do so can subscribe to the feed and automatically keep informed about any additions or changes I make to it. Why on earth hadn’t I thought of this before? How stupid of me…So, here goes with another thing to do…Anyone who thinks life as a librarian is boring doesn’t know their head from a hole in the ground.