Exercise 1: Due Feb 5
The goal of this exercise is to get you familiar with some of the great blogs that are out there for continuing professional development and get you thinking about the different types of blogs and blog posts. Once you're out of school, blogs are a great way to keep up with current trends in libraries and technology. There are literally tens of thousands of blogs that would be useful to librarians interested in technology, but obviously, no one has time to read that many. In order to keep up and still stay sane, we have to be a bit ruthless about what we subscribe to, following only blogs on topics we're most interested in. I subscribe to 199 blogs and other RSS feeds. There are certain blogs I always read word-for-word and others I just skim for relevant content.
Think about what types of blogs you would be interested in reading? What topics are you most interested in? Metadata and cataloging? Then Thingology, Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog, Hanging Together and Inquiring Librarian would be great blogs to subscribe to. Interested in marketing library services? Then Library Marketing: Thinking Outside the Book, Tame the Web, The M Word, and the Ubiquitous Librarian would be good options. There are also librarians who focus on many issues with their blogs. I personally write about whatever issues happen to be on my radar at the time, as opposed to sticking to a certain topical area.
For this activity you are going to subscribe to ten blogs in your new RSS aggregator.
1. First, subscribe to these five blogs in your aggregator (either Google Reader or Bloglines):
3. Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective
2. Visit this list of blogs and click on the titles to view the content of the blogs available on there. Pick five blogs whose content looks interesting to you and subscribe to them in your aggregator.
3. Write a blog post that discusses all of the following:
1. Which five blogs did you subscribe to and why?
2. What do you see as the differences between the five blogs I asked you to subscribe to in terms of the type of blog and type of post (genre, length, etc.).
3. What types of posts do you find most appealing to read and why?
4. How many blogs do you think you could manage to keep up with in an RSS aggregator?
5. Do you think blogs are a good way to keep up with the profession? Why or why not?
To submit your blog post: Create a regular blog post, but just be sure to select Exercise as the topic of the post (from the list of topics).
Each week, I'm going to suggest another blog (or two) to subscribe to that is related to the topic we're covering that week. You're not required to subscribe to them, but it might be useful in order to learn more about the topic.
