Webfeed: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Another major science journal is now offering a "current issue" feed, thought I don't really get why you'd need one for recent issues as well. And surprise: the feeds are mentioned on the journal's homepage.

I forgot to mention this with the OUP feeds, but you need a subscription to access the articles.

Webfeeds: OUP Journals

Oxford University Press has set up RSS feeds for their journals. If you go to the homepage for Bioinformatics, you'll see the link to the RSS page for the journal, which gives the usual introduction as well as two TOC/abstract feeds: one for the current issue, and the other for the latest three issues.

I'm delighted to see another major publisher of science journals move forward with this service, but why, why have they not put a list of the feeds on a single page? Right now, you have to go to the homepage for each journal to grab the feed, or the "content alerting" section for that particular journal (see Nucleic Acids Research). No mention of the feeds even on the main content alerting section.

It's a two-part process: offer the service, and make users aware that the service exists.

Hiatus (Dec 5-10)

Off to San Diego to look for an apartment (new job starts in just over 5 weeks).

Google Scholar Stuff

This week I...

• E-mailed Google Scholar support to express my interest in participating in any kind of survey, study or anything else where I could offer input into improvements they're going to make to it. It's here, it's not going away, and students and faculty alike are going to use it (what student doesn't want one-stop searching?). The more we know about Google Scholar and its strengths and limitations, and the more that librarians can contribute to making this a better product, then we're doing a major service to our patrons--who will still need our help using and getting the most out of it.
• Wrote up a description of those features and limitations for Science News. I only wish I could've made it less wordy.
• Asked Doug if we could set up our own OpenURL Firefox extension to help GSU patrons get to resources they find in Google Scholar. It turns out that he was already working on it, along with a help page for students to remind them to check GIL and the Electronic Journal Locator, etc. The page should be made public this week, but I tested the extension on my computer at home and it worked perfectly. I got search results with "SFX @ GSU" buttons. Clicked the button to bring up SFX information, clicked the journal link, went through our proxy server, and got to an article in Science Direct. Absolutely cool. I'm so glad I started working with Firefox last month.
  

Webfeeds: BIOME

BIOME, the biomedical/life science hub of the Resource Directory Network, has finally set up feeds for users to keep up with the latest internet resources they have added to their directories. The RDN has 8 subject hubs with annotated listings of scholarly internet resources; I think BIOME is the last of the group to set up webfeeds. You can find the list on the Working with BIOME page, as well as the "new additions" section of the particular gateway.

There are resource-rich gateways for nursing and allied health, the natural world, animal health, agriculture/forestry, and biological/biomedical sciences. There are also feeds for the Wellcome Trust sites they host, including one that identifies resources for biomedical ethics.