It occurred to me on the way home (some of my most creative ideas have hit me on my walk home; maybe I really should consider becoming a professional pilgrim if my library career doesn’t work out…), that I could very easily adapt the subject guide blog I made to an academic library career (my current professional goal.) I could pipe in Table of Contents from relevant journals/ New books from the library catalogue, and the blog format would be especially good to be able to tag stuff by subject/piece of literature eg La Celestina- which would help me in my campaign to eliminate all this format hassle. I wonder how hard it would be to embed a blog in the course management software? I’m also pretty excited about the tag cloud concept, which I’d been aware of, but hadn’t really considered before. Check out the way UC Boulder used it to help students narrow down paper choices. (scroll down a bit) This could really easily be adapted to a specific subject/book/topic. Though I think you’d have to be careful how granular you go; librarians seem to love dividing and conquering, but less is more in this case. No-one else likes to cogitate on whether a resource fits into renaissance or mediaeval or golden age categories; just whack it all in! (And choose the original resources well!) I think in the mind of most people more results= more relevant results, even though they rarely look beyond the first page, and most of the results are fairly dross like anyway…

Well, I hope my interviewers will be impressed anyway!