In our quest to continue bringing you news and information in a timely and efficient manner, we are preparing to move the primary format for the Los Angeles Transportation Headlines from Blogger to Paper.li.

This change is scheduled for Monday, June 17, 2013.

While Blogger is a traditional blogging tool, Paper.li, an online newspaper platform built around Twitter, offers us an opportunity to take advantage of several new opportunities while preserving the same service we have provided since 2005.

A number of factors contribute to this decision.

We have used Paper.li for more than a year.  It is a fascinating prospect as a “set-it-and-forget-it” self-generating discovery tool.  In theory, once you set it up, your Paper.li auto-publishes a daily or weekly newspaper on a topic of your choosing.

However, we will continue to moderate the content on workdays to ensure our local transportation issues will be covered with the same attention as they are now.

We realize there will be some questions, so we want to explain how this change will impact our readers.

I subscribe through RSS / Feedburner. What do I need to do?

Nothing! You will continue to receive an email which leads you to the Los Angeles Transportation Headlines on Blogger. The format of the stories may look different, but your subscription remains unchanged.

I subscribe through SimpleSend email management. What do I need to do?

You will be receiving an invitation to subscribe to Paper.li.  If you wish to continue receiving the Los Angeles Transportation Headlines, you must reply to this invitation.

I read the Headlines on the blog site. What do I need to do?

Nothing!  You can still visit the Los Angeles Transportation Headlines for the full “list view” of stories or check out our Paper.li site to see if you prefer the online newspaper format.

If the content will be the same, why is the Metro Transportation Library making this change?

The explosive volume in local transit and transportation news has made it increasingly difficult to efficiently sift through our reliable sources and Google Reader alerts.

Paper.li allows us to create and customize an online newspaper of Los Angeles Transportation Headlines each work each day and to automate part of the process.

With Paper.li, we can take advantage of our extensive Twitter lists and tweak tweets to optimize daily local news and information which is not aggregated elsewhere.

Paper.li is a highly visual tool as well, so will now be able to integrate high-interest Library and Archive resources such as image and video rather than just links to them.

We will also be able to incorporate other Library content, such as our “This Date in Los Angeles Transportation History” calendar entries, Primary Resources blog posts and knowledge base “wiki” pages to push valuable information to our customer base in addition to news items.

Paper.li now allows us to filter in and filter out words based on each news source.  This provides us the ability to distill the most relevant content possible for each day’s newspaper.

We will also continue to include research-related information from Transportation Research Board and other academic sources to best serve our engineers, planners, contractors and consultants in addition to our dedicated transit fans and other library users.

While our Headlines organization in Blogger has relied on alphabetical order, we will continue to customize our Paper.li layout to feature the most valuable stories up at the top of the page.

Stories on Paper.li are divided into sections and hashtag categories to help users find information of interest. (Content in each category is not always displayed, so be sure to “click more” when you see it!)

Finally, Paper.li is still auto-generated every day, so we will be reducing the labor-intensive efforts of collecting stories, assembling them, publishing them in Blogger and disseminating them by hand through an email management program.

We are still Beta testing and seeking feedback, but Paper.li looks like a viable, visual appealing tool to further our goal or collecting and disseminating news and information about transit and transportation in Southern California.

We not only inform our users, but continue to save them incalculable hours of time searching for information and providing them with relevant information, often before they realize they need it.