From the NHAIS Help Desk mailbox:
Is there a way to keyword search the NHAIS Notes blog besides the Posts by topic list?
Yes, just look for the search box in the upper left of the screen:
Searching by month/year or topic are also options.
Archives for e-mail lists managed by NHAIS Services include the current month and previous 3 months but archives for NHAIS Notes go back to the blog's start in 2006. You can find older messages by date or topic or keyword.
By default, messages appear in reverse chronological order. You can use the Older Posts link at the bottom of each page to see older messages--but that's not really practical to find posts from several months or years ago.
Among options in the right-hand column is Posts by Date, where you can select a month from the dropdown menu. Numbers in parentheses indicate how many messages are available from each month.
You can enter a keyword search in the box at the upper left.
Just like any other work you create, it is a good idea to make regular backups of your blog. This post walks you through how to back up a blog hosted on Blogger. Other sites (like WordPress) work differently, but the concept remains the same, you should back up your work!
Many New Hampshire libraries publish blogs which (if they are updated regularly) are a great way to get information out to the public about what is happening in your library. For several years now the NHAIS Notes blog has included a list of "NH Library Blogs to Check Out." This morning I finished the transition of that feature from a static link list to a blogroll that displays the headline of the latest blog posts from each of these blogs.
To check out the latest news from NH library blogs (+ the NHLA blog) visit NHAIS Notes and scroll down to the bottom of the page where the 5 most recently updated blogs will appear on the right side. If you want to expand the list beyond the top 5 you can click on the link at the bottom right of the list that says "show all."
If your library is in New Hampshire and has a blog that isn't included in the expanded list please send me an email with the URL of your library's blog and I will add it.
We will be moving our collection of NHAIS Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) from their previous location in a Horizon database onto this blog. Consequently, you will get lots of new postings from the blog as we load these (updated) questions and answers. We will keep them to only a couple each day so you aren't swamped with postings.
When everything is moved over, we will complete the FAQ page here on the blog to serve as an index to all these . (Blogger now has pages!)
You know those quick little tasks that you think won't be a big deal that turn into a nightmare? Well, I had one of those today.
I tried to change the email address in the account that controls the email distribution of the NHAIS Notes blog to reflect my new (ok, several months old now) @dcr email address. Somehow this resulted in the deactivation of the email distributed feeds set up in that account. If you were subscribed to NHAIS Notes (or Book Notes, the Center for the Book blog) via email, you probably are not any more.
To fix this, please go to the blog and enter your email address into the box at the bottom of the right hand panel again. If you got this posting in your email, then you are all set and don't need to do anything.
I am sending a message to the NHAIS listserv about this, and indicated in that message that if you didn't get this posting this situation applies to you. I apologize for the inconvenience. If you have questions about this please call me at 271-2866 or email me.
When we initially set up this blog we included two options for receiving it via email: Feedblitz and Squeet. The Feedblitz option, which seems to be very reliable, provides a daily digest of everything that was posted to the blog the previous day. The Squeet option was supposed to provide email distribution of posts several times each day. This has not been reliably the case over the past year and now the Squeet site has been totally unavailable for several days. Consequently, we have removed the option of subscribing via Squeet from our site. If you want an email version of this blog, please use the Feedblitz digest option which is at the very bottom of the NHAIS blog on the far right. Of course you can also subscribe to the RSS feed using whatever reader you like. This change also applies to the Book Notes NH Blog.
Since I began playing around with blogs I have talked to several NH library people who asked if there were other libraries in NH with blogs. There are, and I began compiling a list of them several months ago to help me try to keep up with the stuff going on in NH libraries. I have added this list to the right-hand panel of this blog so anyone who is interested can see what other NH libraries are doing. As with any list, this one is no doubt missing things. Please let me know (mrussell@library.state.nh.us) which New Hampshire libraries (or librarians) have blogs that I should add to the list.
Another issue that has come up in conversations about blogs is what library-related blogs are out there and which ones are worth reading. I think everyone will have a different answer to which ones are worth reading, depending on their particular interests, but Bobbi & I are working on an idea to point you (if you are interested) to parts of the blogosphere that we have found interesting, helpful, relevant, or in some cases just cool. Stay tuned for details on that.
You may also notice that the subscription information for NHAIS Notes is no longer at the top of the blog. I have moved it to the bottom of the screen and pulled the NHAIS links and blog indexing higher up the page to make it easier to find.
There are a growing number of libraries here in NH who are creating blogs to communicate with their communities. I plan to use the space at the lower right of our NHAIS blog to spotlight different library blogs that I come across. Today I added a live feed from the Madison Library's blog. If your library (or your librarian) has a blog that you would like me to share with the NHAIS community send me an email (mrussell@library.state.nh.us) with the link to your RSS feed.
To get information from our blog to the people in NHAIS libraries we have set up an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed. (FYI: we used Feedburner to do this) Having an RSS feed basically means that our blog postings can be ‘broadcast’ to anyone who wants to receive them. We have built into this site several ways people can get this feed.
The first of these built in subscription options is using an RSS to email reader from Squeet (I know, it’s a weird name, but so is Google and we say that all the time) you can have each posting made to the NHAIS blog sent to you as an email message.
There were a couple of reasons I like Squeet over other options for this:
1- the message that is sent out has the name of the blog it came from in the subject line followed by the title of the individual post, which helps you identify incoming emails as NHAIS info
2- the frequency of the delivery can be controlled by the subscriber when they set it up – you can get messages live, or daily, or weekly, whatever suits you
3- the tests I did showed that the messages actually arrive in your inbox soon after they are posted, other options seem to have a longer delay before I got the emailed postings
4- the subscription information is confidential, Squeet says that they don’t share the addresses of people who use their service, which I thought would appeal to the privacy-sensitive librarian in all of us.
5- As the blog administrator I can get a count of the number of subscriptions (not who they are, just a total number) and when they were set up so I have some idea if we are actually reaching anyone with this information
6- The sign up was fairly simple to deal with for the subscriber.
To set up an email subscription to get NHAIS Notes postings as they are created:
Type the email address where you want to get the feed into the purple box where it says “enter your email here to subscribe” then click the subscribe button.
A form with “subscribe to NHAIS Notes” at the top will display. If you have used Squeet before and you have a password for it, enter your password and proceed. If you are new to Squeet you will need to use the radio button above where your email address displays to switch to the ‘signup’ page instead of the login page.
At the login page enter your name; change the timezone to ‘Eastern time (US & Canada)’ or whatever timezone you want to get your email in; create a password for your account and then type it in again to make sure you typed what you think you did.
The default on the form is that you will want to subscribe to the Squeet blog in addition to the NHAIS Notes blog. If you don’t want the Squeet blog sent to your email address uncheck the box below your password. When everything is entered, click the “SIGN UP” button.
Squeet will display a page full of topics that they hope will interest you and you can check off any of them to be subscribed to feeds on these topics – again this is in addition to the NHAIS Notes blog that you came here to sign up for. If you don’t want any of these click on the NO THANKS button at the bottom of the window.
The next screen you see will tell you that your account status is unverified. Close the browser window. You will receive an email message fairly soon (but not immediately in my experience) from DoNotReply@squeet.com which includes a “Verify your email address” link in it as well as information about ways to make sure you get the messages you signed up for. Click on the verification link to reopen the Squeet.com page which will say “Account status: Confirmed” at the top and have your NHAIS Notes subscription listed at the bottom of it. If the frequency listed on the NHAIS Notes feed subscription line says “live” then you will get a message each time a post is added to the blog. If you want to change this so it comes less often click on the edit icon at the left end of the subscription line (it looks like a paper with a green pencil on it). Drop down boxes will appear on the line for the elements you can change, adjust them to suit you and then click on the ‘update” icon (it looks like a blue floppy disk).
At this point you have a Squeet account and are subscribed to the NHAIS Notes blog. You can use this same Squeet account to get any other blogs you are interested in emailed to you by entering the feed address (which is usually slightly different from the blog address) into the box at the top of the Squeet subscription page.
This blog was created to replace NHU-PAC News which published its last issue recently. Why a blog? It will allow us to get news out in a more timely fashion than accumulating items for the next issue of NHU-PAC News. It will provide a searchable archive of past items. It will let you see all postings on a single topic like interlibrary loan, cataloging, or searching (use the links at the right marked "posts by topic"). It will also provide a place -- outside of the state computer system -- where you can check for system news. When a listserv, or a NHU-PAC function, or the whole NHU-PAC is out of whack we plan to post that information here so you will know what is going on.
A Blog also gives you a choice of how you get the news: you can read it on the Web or have postings e-mailed to you as individual messages or daily digests or have postings fed to you via RSS or Atom feeds. The State Library's Electronic Information Resources section is joining NHAIS Services in contributing to NHAIS Notes so you'll find news about NHewLink in addition to items about the NHU-PAC.
We plan to spotlight library related blogs as we come across them. The first one -- you'll find a feed from it in the lower right of this page -- is the Audiobooks blog Bobbi Slossar created for the NHSL Overdrive project. If your library has a blog, or if you read one you think others might be interested in, let me know by emailing me. (mrussell @ library.state.nh.us)
