Videos

It was a surprise to look at Mosman Library and see Paul Brunton's talk on Miles Franklin had been videoed. I think I would be quite nervous about that process, being filmed but of course Paul handled it no problems.
I think our Library could really take advantage of the video technology, especially in terms of making short educational introductions to parts of our collections and using catalogues etc. For example the Quickstart presentations that Pictures staff used to give could be videoed once and posted to our website. As the live presentations are very resource-intensive, a video would be a much more efficient way of conveying the information without the clients even having to come into the Library, and they could watch it whenever they wanted to. It would also be good for the Library to tape some of the curator talks and post them to the website for the public and even interested staff.

RSS

I agree that RSS can be a time saver in that you receive news as it happens, without having to go out and look for it or look for updates at a favourite website. However I have previously subscribed to something similar in the past, email distribution lists, and I found that as my interests changed the usefulness could quickly lessen. Then the temptation is to just delete the news posts as they come in and never actually unsubscribe officially. There's a lot of unwanted and unread info that lands in our email inbox that never gets cleaned up and I wonder if this could happen with RSS too. There is an interesting application I heard of recently in the media however. It's not exactly RSS but similar. The service is for Manly Jetcat commuters and every time a ferry service is cancelled you get notified on your mobile. I think you register for which service you would normally catch and then if there is delays or cancellations you get a message. This could be handy if you catch the same service every day all the time which most people don't, but it's still an interesting application that could be useful. I'm sure there's many applications for the Library with RSS to clients, as long as they don't require excessive maintenance as then resourcing always becomes an issue.