New Ways of Communicating with Digital Library Users

Project Bluebird: notifications research at Talis is an ongoing umbrella project that is exploring how new technologies can be used to improve the ways in which academic and public lending libraries communicate with their users. There aren't many details on the Project Bluebird site yet (though there is this basic white paper on libraries and RSS), but it's probably worth keeping tabs on (now why don't they have an RSS feed about this project...?)

Here's something to be wary of on older sites, though - RSS in a library context is not necessarily to do with the sort of XML feed you may expect your blog to produce. It also stands for (or at least stood until recently for) Resources Sharing System, a "protocol-based automation system that managed borrowing and lending requests." It has since been renamed by its developers (if the site redirect is anything to go by) to
Universal Resource Sharing Application (URSA).

Anyway (and here's one I think I may have blogged before) for a quite wideranging peek at the way various libraries are using RSS feeds, have a look at RSS(sm): Rich Site Services. Blogs, news and what's new appear to be the mainstays.

And finally, I've seen online bank account consolidators before, but a library account consolidator is new to me. Still, the ELF Personal Email Library Reminder Service seems eminently sensible...