Data Mining: RSS & Blogs, a DC/SLA Program
(Volume 55, Issue 1/2, May 2007)
Tracy Landfried, SLA Maryland Chapter President-Elect, tlandfri@arl.army.mil
Sabrini Pacifici moved to web publishing in 1996 to better her serve her clients and her profession.
On November 16, 2006, Shirley Loo, 2006 chapter president of DC/SLA, welcomed us to this Chapter program, held at the Library of Congress. The program was well-attended despite the stormy weather and tornado warnings for Maryland and Virginia. Loo introduced Sabrina Pacifici, whose goal is to empower us to communicate effectively using the web.
Pacifici founded, edits, and publishes LLRX.com and beSpacific.com, a webzine and a blog, respectively. LLRX.com is a free, independent webzine that provides information professionals with reliable, comprehensive, and current resources and reviews of websites and services on law and technology. Visit her site at http://www.llrx.com. Also, check out her blog, http://www.bespacific.com/, updated daily, which contains a database of 11,000 plus entries to primary and secondary sources in areas of interest to Pacifici: e-government, privacy, FOIA, copyright, government documents, legislation, enterprise blogging, RRS, et al.
Pacifici believes librarians can and should be mining the web for the best free and low-cost websites for our clients, companies, or agencies. We must mine the web and let our patrons know its rich current content, width, breadth, and shallow depth. We must keep abreast of the new technologies, websites, and aggregators; we must demonstrate their use, strengths, and weaknesses to our users.
It is impossible to know and to use everything on the web - there is too much and new things appear every moment. We must evaluate websites and new technologies and recommend the best. If/when better sites or technologies appear, we should move to them. If something that was good stops doing the job, leave it and go to something better.
Blogs and Wikis are good but take work to create and maintain.
Everything is not on the web – and what is there is not all free. The best organized, accurate, and authentic information is often fee. Occasionally, though, Pacifici will find items free on one site that are fee on another.
Mine the free sources as effectively as possible.
Pacifici, a true technocognescente, moved from Desktop publishing to the web in 1996 – with LLRX.com. She started a blog on law and technology in 2002. LLRX.com has an audience close to 150,000. Pacifici still keeps a well-used binder of website/websearch cheat sheets on her desk – and recommends the practice to everyone.
The web empowers us and we can empower our communities through our shared knowledge of and through it. Pacifici looks for good sources with quality content. She only recommends what she finds useful (she searches up to 18 hours some days.)
Pacifici described the research process, the importance of marketing, using knowledge management applications like blogs and wikis and why they are important. Technology has not made our lives easier or simpler. It is tougher to keep up and to train our clients in the new technologies that appear at breakneck speed and overwhelming numbers. Technorati tracks and monitors 57 million blogs as of 15 November 2006.
Researchers have it tough on the web. Few can read a 900-page document online, increasingly the only option for government reports. The web has much current content, but little archival depth.
Pacific took us at a rapid pace though dozens of aggregators, websites, blogtrackers, RSS feeds, podcasting and multimedia search engines. She is using less fee-based and more free or low cost websites than ever before.
She is one of the technocognescente that mine the web for the hard-to-find, deep, and well-hidden gems – and then give them to the rest of us. As information professionals, w e must do likewise for our clients and patrons.
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