LibWorm
I had planned on building my own medical RSS portal when I first made contact with Frankie Dolan online through her RSS4medics site. After a couple of transatlantic phone calls with Frankie, I decided that instead of following through with my plans to build my own portal, I would pester Frankie with my ideas on how to enhance and expand her amazing MedWorm. Frankie’s work is great, and I’m very flattered that Frankie chooses to acknowledge my minor contributions to MedWorm, but it is probably most fair to say that I was just MedWorm’s loudest user.
In September of 2006 it occurred to me that the same framework that made MedWorm work could be applied to feeds related to Libraries. I pitched Frankie the idea, and she said she was game if I would manage the collection/categorization of feeds and day-to-day administrative tasks. We launched LibWorm as a public beta in late November of 2006 with about 1100 feeds indexing. As of the end of December 2006, we were up to about 1500 indexed feeds and still growing. LibWorm ends up being a useful way to search for (and subscribe to) the latest buzz in the Biblioblogosphere on anything that interests an individual librarian. We’re proud of it, and terribly pleased with the warm reception it has received. LibWorm’s improvements since its public beta release are due largely to excellent user feedback from libraryfolk.
Working more closely together on LibWorm has accelerated the development of Frankie’s ‘Worm platform, and it is exciting to see that innovations developed for LibWorm get rolled into MedWorm as well.
For updates on LibWorm (new features, new documentation, new categories or subjects), see this category or subscribe to this feed.
Masterlist of MedLib Blogs
When I first started reading biblioblogs, I was distressed at how difficult it was to find blogs about health sciences librarianship, and I was surprised to see they didn’t interact as much as they could. In October of 2006, I proposed a Wiki page where medical libraryfolk could keep track of blogs by/for/about medical libraryfolk. The community of MedLib bloggers has responded to the idea, and the list is now maintained as a page of the LISWiki.
Wanting to see more interaction between these blogs, I created a MedLib Blog badge that links back to the masterlist:
My hope was that MedLib bloggers would post this to their blog sidebars, identifying themselves as members of a community of MedLib bloggers and encouraging readers to explore other MedLib blogs. The response has been very encouraging.
