Keeping up with the Library

Have you ever wondered who the first Vatican Librarian was? Or why he was chosen? You (or someone you know) may have had a conversation with Fiona or myself on how to find books, either for purchase or to borrow from the library. There are many places you can look to find this information. Or lastly, if you aren't already using a feed reader to keep up with the news you like to follow, you can go to one place to find out how to do this. This month's library newsletter, Scriptoria, has the answer to those questions as well as many others.

Passing of an era

Somehow, all of February escaped us! I also noticed that it's been a while since I've last posted here. Well, the Rocky Mountain News has left us, just a few months shy of turning 150 years old. The library still subscribes to the Denver Post, but you may be left wondering where else you might turn for daily news.

Well, if you're reading this blog, you might be reading others as well. You may also have been referring to the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News online. There are many of these websites that use RSS feeds to publish their pages. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is really just a tool that allows the creators of these pages to make available their frequently updated information. If a website, blog, or YouTube page updates frequently, they probably use an RSS feed to publish their information.

So what, you might be asking? How does this affect me? If you are already looking in various locations for news, you have the ability to condense all that into one location. A feed aggregator brings all this published information into one conveniently packaged place. The aggregator that I use (and Fiona too) is Bloglines. No more remembering to look at 20, 30, even 40 news sources daily, a service like Bloglines brings it all together for you.

Stop by the library anytime, and Fiona or I can show you how this technology works. This is a way of having information come to you, rather than remembering to go out and find it. For example, you could subscribe to "Saint of the Day" via Catholic.org, the Vatican's YouTube feed, the Catholic News Agency news reports, the Zenit News Agency, and even this blog. This is one stop shopping at its finest!