Do you find that you are missing news items that go up on Camelot/Counterculture? If so read on to learn more about how the news is created and stored, and some simple ways you can keep up to date.
Library staff news is created and maintained on the Counterculture blog. This means that anyone in the Library can add news, comment on items, we can categorise news, it’s searchable, and archived, and there is an rss feed available.
The rss feed is displayed also on the Camelot wiki. We’ve recently increased the number of news items that displays on this feed to 10. However you’ll only ever see the item title, and won’t know what category it’s under or how many comments there are.
To get the best out of staff news, go to the Counterculture blog itself. There’s a link to it on the Camelot wiki home page. You may like to bookmark it so you don’t have to go through the login process to get to the wiki, and Counterculture is usually available when the wiki isn’t. In the blog, you can see the 20 most recent news items (postings in blog language) in date order. You’ll see the full posting (unless it’s been divided into a teaser and “read more” like this posting) and the number of comments. Click on the title, or the number of comments to see and/or add comments. You will need to be logged in to add a comment – the login box is in the right nav bar.
In the right nav bar you can see the postings with recent discussion (gives an indication of the hot topics of the moment), the most recent postings and the categories. Click on any category to limit the postings to that category – useful to find postings about any training courses, vacancies or LLT/BLT minutes that will be in the Staff News category.
You can also see older postings by looking in the archives, or use the Search to find that posting that you know you saw but can’t remember when. The Search functionality isn’t perfect though – it doesn’t like some characters – the ampersand in PD&R for example.
You can also get postings sent to your email via the RSS feed option, as follows:
1) In Outlook, you’ll see an RSS folder.
2) Right click on this and choose Add a New RSS feed.
3) The url is http://blogs.libr.canterbury.ac.nz/xml-rss2.php?blogid=13. Paste this in, and click Add.
4) Either, click Yes at this point to get the items sent to a folder under the RSS folder, or, if you want to get them sent to your Inbox, click on the Advanced button. From here you can change your Delivery Location – click on Change Folder and choose your Inbox.
5) You may like to check the option “Download the full article as an.html attachment to each item” (under the Downloads heading). However, even without this option, the email will include a link to the full posting.
To delete an RSS feed:
1) On the Tools menu, click Account Settings.
2) Click the RSS Feeds tab.
3) Under Feed Name, click the feed you want cancel, and then click Remove.
Send any questions or comments you might have about Camelot, or Counterculture. And don’t forget to add your comments to any posting – it all adds to the sharing of information and skills.
Catherine and Donna