Information professionals are list makers. From Gary Price's classic List of Lists (http://www.specialissues.com/lol/) to Peter Scott's lists of all things RSS (http://www.allrss.com), we are always trying to put all types of information into some type of list. Some of these lists are lengthy, such as PubSub's community list of librarian weblogs (http://www.pubsub.com/lists/librarian), which, as of this writing, is over 200. Others are short, such as a recent post at LISnews from Blake Carver on the 10 blogs to read in 2006 (http://features.lisnews.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/21/1328204).

Classic librarianship is also built upon creating reading lists for our patrons to assist in recommendations and other readers advisory services. This has historically been in the form of book lists for students, but have also become popular among adult readers due to the surgency of book clubs around the country (Thanks Oprah!)

Blogrolls are the blogging community's version of reading lists. A blogroll is a list of blogs that act as recommendations. It's a blogger's way of saying, "I read these blogs, so if you like mine, you'll probably like the ones mentioned on this list" As with the lists mentioned above, some are short while others are long. The shorter a blogroll, however, the more likely that readers will follow through and add the blogs to their daily readling list. In addition, if one were to subcribe to a colleagues entire blogroll (which could be lengthy - If you remember my column from last month I'm hoping that you read it, I subscribe to over 600 feeds) on top of their own, blog reading will get a bit hairy and will seem like a chore to many.

It was with this theory that Dave Winer (a pioneer in the blogging and RSS industries) concieved the concept of Reading Lists, inspired in part, on the software that he is currently developing, the OPML Editor (http://support.opml.org). OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), as a basic definition, is a list of feeds. If I wanted to provide a colleague with a list of some of the blogs that I read that he could easily import into his aggregator, sending him an OPML file is the best and easiest way to do so. In fact, most aggregators have an import/export OPML functionality built into their services. OPML files do not necessarily have to be a flat list. Using the OPML editor, one can easily create hierarchies of lists, with subfolders and categorical schema. It's a simple, yet powerful tool for exchanging feed lists.

Reading lists were conceived as short lists in order to assist the blogger to narrow down a blogroll into essential pieces. While there is no cut off point for the number of feeds on a reading list, it has been inferred that it they should be under 20 (and that number is a bit liberal - some reading list advocates think these lists should be cut off at 10).

+ Automatic Updates of lists.

+ Advice in creating Reading Lists.

How do reading lists help librarians?

+ User created hierarchies/directories

+ Authority Control?