Wednesday’s Weblogs: Reference

I was recently asked by a CFLC member who has to recapture some e-mail subscriptions if I could recommend some good e-mail lists for reference work. In contemplating it, I felt this might make a useful blog post for others as well.

My first recommendation, having used an RSS aggregator for quite a while now, would be to subscribe to as many lists as you can via a reader rather than via e-mail. (Here and here are good articles on what RSS is all about.) There are a number of good readers/aggregators out there, some requiring downloading software and some available over the Web. There are a couple of good articles comparing readers here and here. My personal favorite (because it was free, easy, and readily available at the time I started reading blogs) is Bloglines. There's a great article by Joy Weese Moll that will walk newbies through how to use it, Bloglines for Librarians in Three (and a half) Easy Steps, and another with a lot of screenshots, Using Bloglines (or How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday).

Once subscribed to a reader, most of them have lists of popular feeds from which you can select. However, you can also enter the RSS addresses or URLs for specific blogs and lists and subscribe to them that way.

Since the actual question I was asked had to do with reference, here are some excellent choices for staying up-to-date with Web sites useful for reference work:

• Librarians' Internet Index New This Week (Weekly listing of "between thirty to sixty websites representing the best of the Web" added to LII.): RSS & e-mail
• ResearchBuzz ("News about search engines, databases, and other information collections."): RSS & e-mail both available here
  
• Resource Shelf ("A daily newsletter with resources of interest to information professionals, educators and journalists."): RSS & e-mail
  
• DocuTicker (Daily companion to the above, focusing on "new reports from government agencies, ngo's, think tanks, and other groups."): RSS & e-mail (incorporated into the above newsletter)
  
• Internet Resources Newsletter (From a British University library, a "free monthly newsletter for academics, students, engineers, scientists and social scientists."): RSS & e-mail
• Sites and Soundbytes (Blog from the director of a public library in Wisconsin, this also has a great set of similar links under the sideblog header "where i find my sites" [sic].): RSS only
• CFLC Currents (This blog...sorry, had to add it! "Tuesday's Tools" feature some Web reference tools, databases, etc.): RSS only
• Library Link of the Day ("[P]rovides you a daily link for keeping up to date with the library profession..."): RSS & e-mail
  
• FreePint (Slight British/European and business slant to "a global network of people who find, use, manage and share work-related information."): partial content via RSS & newsletter via e-mail
  
• Stumpers-L ("The Stumpers list is a place for librarians (and others) to discuss reference questions which they are unable to answer using available resources..."): e-mail only
• LIBREF-L ("Discussion of Library Reference Issues."): e-mail only
  

That probably is enough for an introductory post about reference blogs. I'll take on some other topical blogs in future posts.

What other reference-related blogs or e-mail lists do you read and recommend?

SUBJECTS: WEDNESDAY'S WEBLOGS