I sure wish I could attend the Usability Week conference and programs this year in San Francisco.
Also (via Slashdot), the WSJ has a brief article with Jakob Nielsen discussing email newsletters and RSS. A recent study on usability of email newsletters vs RSS, available at the useit.com, show that 82% of users don’t know what RSS is and recommends using the term News Feeds to explain what it does. Good email newsletters are treated like a service, like an actual publication that people are expecting and anticipating. Design and usability are a huge factor in how that information gets across. Their study also shows that users spend an average of 51 seconds reading a newsletter but they are really just scanning it and the highest percentage is just scanning the first two words of a heading.
Getting any message across is going to be difficult, but by offering interesting and usable articles that are available across multiple platforms (RSS, email, web, and print) and published at predictable intervals will pave the way for libraries to effectively share their services. I was thinking that we could have shorter articles in the print version and offer longer ones via email and RSS. That way a six page mailer could be cut down to two or four and we can avoid info overload especially since people don’t read the entire thing unless they are interested in a specific article.