Webfeeds: PLoS Journals

This may be another one that I didn't catch on my radar, but the Public Library of Science offers feeds for their 3 journals: PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, and PLoS Computational Biology. On each journal homepage there's a feed for recent articles, and for PLoS Medicine there's also one for recent research articles. When you access the Current Issue for each one, you also get a choice of 2 feeds under "Download XML" for Table of Contents and Research Articles. I just subscribed to the ones on the homepages.

Not surprisingly, there's no single page that lists all of these.

Testing Blogger Images

Just testing out the new Blogger Images feature, which means uploading images without going through a dozen steps and still not getting a picture.

Here's one of the Geisel (as in Dr. Seuss) Library at UCSD, from the southwest corner. It's home to several libraries, including Science & Engineering. The tower is primarily social sciences and humanities materials, while we're in the grass off to the far right in the east wing.

Photograph by David Westphal

Webfeeds: PubMed!!

Thanks to Steven for the heads-up. PubMed's "send to RSS" option has gone live.

I've already set up a few alerts in Bloglines. The e-journal icons you get in PubMed carry over in the feed so you can go right to the article (assuming you have access, etc.). Unfortunately, it also cut off the names of my search feeds. Substrate specificity and protein phosphatases became PubMed: fluorescent specificit....

The odd thing is that the new results aren't showing up bold in Bloglines. This is also happening with my Factiva and ProQuest feeds, even though I'm getting the new content. Is this a Bloglines quirk with some dynamically generated search feeds? It's not happening with HubMed, ADS or Compendex.

Publisher/Webfeed Report: SLA Toronto

When I asked about feeds:

• Royal Society of Chemistry - coming soon; will probably start with Chemistry World
• Science Direct - coming but no date
• APS was actually promoting their feeds
• AIP, ACM, Wiley, ASME - variations of "don't know"
• Blackwell - no
• IEEE - planning to expand their current list; we also discussed the possiblity of search feeds
• ACS - thinks their working on it, and will check
• PubMed - didn't know when "Send to RSS" option will go live

Toronto (June 4-9)

I'll be at SLA, naturally. If I can snag a computer I might post while I'm up there (no laptop). Otherwise I'll have lots of notes for when I'll get back. I'm going to be checking in with all of our vendors to check on their progress in offering webfeeds.

There's been some chatter this year about how librarian-bloggers will identify themselves at the conference. I made up some badge stickers that I'll be bringing. Scroll down the page and you'll see it on the right under the Webfeed section. And yes, I borrowed this from the PAM group.

More on the ProQuest Feeds

In early May, I wrote about ProQuest's Curriculum Match Factor project, which John Law presented at a California Digital Library meeting. In the presentation he included screencaps of how libraries and faculty could use the feeds to generate "headlines" of the newest articles for one of about 70 topics--with links back to ABI Inform. He kindly sent me the screencaps to use in my presentation to the UCSD Library staff.

Those screencaps are now on the ProQuest site. I'm taking copies to SLA for when I meet with vendors. This is an excellent of what libraries and faculty could do with feeds, and what a marketing opportunity this is for the journal publishers and database providers.