This week was VALA 2024 and I was lucky enough to attend and present a poster. The point of the post was essentially to act as a sneaky advertising billboard for Aus GLAMR, an aggregator and news site for blogs, newsletters, events and groups by and for GLAMR workers in Australia and Aotearoa.
I haven't blogged about this yet because I was waiting for VALA, but I actually deployed it a few months ago. Aus GLAMR is the latest iteration of an application I've been running for around 8 years: previously known as Aus GLAM Blogs. It started life as a simple JavaScript file triggered by a cron job, to tweet out new blog posts from Australian librarians. Over time I've re-written it three times, with Aus GLAMR being the latest, bringing a considerable expansion of both scope and functionality.
There were two triggers for this rewrite - firstly the previous version had some dependencies that were proving troublesome and would have been a big effort to replace. Secondly, Twitter had reached its final death throes, and Elon Musk decided to start charging for use of the Twitter API.
Using Aus GLAMR to reach a bigger audience for your thing
For authors and organisers, Aus GLAMR helps you to reach GLAMR workers so they can find out about your latest blog posts or newsletter editions, your event, or your online group. You can register your thing:
- Blog: If it's a website that often or sometimes has Strong GLAMR Themes, with an RSS or Atom feed, you can register it here.
- Newsletter: Whether it uses Ghost, Write.as, Mailchimp or something else, if it's an email newsletter with some kind of GLAMR focus you can register it here.
- Group: A "group" could be an email list, a subreddit, Mastodon server, etc. If it's a many-to-many electronic medium, it's probably a "group".
- Event: Conference, convention, seminar, workshop, talk, meet-up...
Whilst the previous iterations all let you register and get updates about blog posts, Aus GLAMR introduces newsletters, groups and events. Basically I considered all the things GLAM Twitter was good for finding out about, and tried to include them here.
Subscribing to find out what's happening in GLAMR
On the other side of the equation, you can subscribe to get updates on the latest things being registered or captured. You have a few options depending on your preference:
- get a weekly email update
- follow the Mastodon bot via an ActivityPub application.
- subscribe via RSS:
- blog posts
- events and calls for proposals
- newsletters
- everything
Using Aus GLAMR to find what you want to know about
One of the things that was important to me when migrating from the Aus GLAM Blogs to Aus GLAMR was to retain the references to old blog posts. This turned out to be a bit harder than I anticipated, as I was migrating an encrustation of three different versions of MongoDB data into Postresql. Depending on when the blog had been added, there was more or less information, and in some cases the blog was listed with an HTTP protocol whilst later posts were HTTPS. It was a bit of a mess, and there was some duplication. Ultimately I used the existing data and ran a custom Python script that pulled more information from each RSS feed or website using Beautiful Soup, to create a Django fixture that could then initiate the new database.
You can now reap the benefits of this because with a slightly enlarged and normalised set of data, you can search the collection by keyword, or browse by type, category, or blog/newsletter. If you're interested in past Australian library blogs on a particular topic, for example, you can use Aus GLAMR to find them.
What's next?
I'd love for the GLAMR community in Australia and Aotearoa to embrace the Aus GLAMR app to share and find out about what's happening in the professions. I'm hoping the weekly email update will enable wider dissemination than the previous requirement to use Twitter, Mastodon or RSS. If you work in GLAMR, please tell people about it!
As a last little aside – the only reason the core functionality of Aus GLAMR is possible is because of the RSS and Atom standards. These are free and open standards anyone can use. And they do use them, even though most people don't realise it. Every blogging software and most newsletter platforms include RSS running quietly in the background. This is how Aus GLAMR knows there is a new blog post or newsletter edition to add to the database. Podcasting runs on RSS too. Open standards are always bigger and better than corporate APIs. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.