Using RSS Feeds: Librarians vs. Historians

September 28, 2006 at 2:55 am | In Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

I subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds from Project MUSE in order to keep up with both history and library scholarship (and to see what’s going on in other areas of interest) and happened to notice a trend with the feeds to which I subscribe – the library-related feeds have way more subscribers in Bloglines than the history-related feeds.  A few examples:

  • Libraries and the Cultural Record – 15 subscribers
  • Library Trends – 23 subscribers
  •  portal: libraries and the academy – 43 subscribers
  • Reviews in American History – 6 subscribers
  • Journal of World History – 1 subscriber
  • Eighteenth-Century Studies – 4 subscribers
  • Past & Present – 4 subscribers

That’s a pretty major difference.  One might even see it as a trend.  Obviously, this does not approach any sort of thorough empirical study, but it certainly seems like librarians are way more up on (and interested in) RSS feeds than the scholarly faculty whom we serve.

Zotero = Happiness

September 5, 2006 at 3:41 pm | In history, libraries | Leave a Comment

I’m very excited about Dan Cohen’s Zotero research tool.  He introduces the project on his blog today.  One of the main complaints that I (and others) have with using Linux is that there aren’t any good citation management tools (EndNote, which is what we use here at GSU, is only compatible with Windows and Mac).  Having a good web-based research tool like Zotero solves the problem by being platform independent.  I hope that this isn’t supposed to be a secret, but I’m one of the beta testers for Zotero and so far I love it!

Some Faculty Success

September 4, 2006 at 5:07 pm | In Instruction, history | Leave a Comment

I was not looking forward to Friday – I had instruction in the morning and I just wasn’t mentally up for it. To make matters worse, I was running late and I forgot that Friday was the first day of September and I hadn’t gotten my September MARTA card yet. Luckily, I had the $1.75 for the train or I would have been even later.

I made it to the instruction session just fine, but was greeted (inadvertantly) with a pleasant surprise: the prof. was handing out the Department’s standards for undergrads with my library research competencies attached! I asked the prof. about it and he remarked that he had just seen this document a month ago and felt it was important that the students should see what was expected of them as majors. He was further hoping that the document would become the template for the intro. to the major course, with the research competencies a basis for creating meaningful assignments in the course. I’m not sure this counts as a major victory, but it definitely felt like one. Hopefully, other faculty will feel the same way.

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