Webfeeds: American Chemical Society Journals (mid-December)

According to ACS, they will have feeds for all their journals by the middle of December. Outstanding!!

Webfeeds: IEEE Explore

IEEE now has feeds for all of their journals. Each one can be accessed from its respective journal's homepage. However, in a goofy move, you cannot get to the complete list unless you enter a name and e-mail address. The list is currently on their e-mail alerts page, where it does make sense to request that information (though you don't actually have to enter a valid e-mail address). But it's not necessary for an RSS feed list, and inconvenient if I want to add the journals to my list and link them all to a single page rather than the individual journal homepages.

Send an e-mail to IEEE Explore feedback: thank them for the feeds, and ask them to place the list on a page separate from the e-mail alerts.

Navigating the Information Sea with RSS (CLA Presentation)

Here's the presentation I gave last week at the California Library Association meeting in Pasadena. Both are PPT.

"Live" presentation - this is the one I actually gave. The network/internet access was there, as promised, so it was able to go to all of my websites and add feeds to Bloglines and FeedDemon.

Presentation w/ screencaps - this was the backup I prepared, with all of the sites included.

I think it went pretty well. There were about 40 people, mostly from public libraries (with academic libraries a distant second). Only 2 of them had blogs set up at their libraries, some were at least familiar with RSS, but most had at least heard of it.

One thing that came up in the discussion was the difference in how academic and public libraries (and smaller academic libraries) access journals. That publishers like Royal Society of Chemistry and Nature Publishing Group offer feeds for their journals is more important for academic libraries that license access directly with the publishers. But public libraries that rely more on the aggregators (ProQuest/Ebsco/Gale) to get their full-text need those providers to offer the feeds. A public library user who has the RSC feed for Chemical Communications isn't going to be able to get the PDF off the RSC site. First, they're going to need aggregator-provided feeds to direct them to the available full-text articles in these collections. ProQuest has taken the first step with their Curriculum Match Factor feeds, but all three vendors need to be moving forward with this.

One attendee wisely questioned the necessity of offering feeds for patrons to keep up with overdue and recall/pickup notices. I'll agree that some RSS feed offerings don't make a lot of sense (like offering feeds for the current issue and 3 most recent issues). There's clearly an element of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. The other library feeds, like OPAC custom searches and new book listings by LC were clearly of more interest.

CLA Conference

Sunday afternoon, I'll be at the California Library Association conference in Pasadena, giving a presentation on RSS. (If you read SD Librarian or any of our UCSD stuff--stop by and say 'hi'). Like my previous experience at a state library conference, I'm hoping for a good mix of academic, school and public librarians. Unlike my previous experience at GLA, where most of our cell phones didn't even work on Jekyll Island, I've been promised internet access. Which just means I've had to prepare 2 versions of my presentation: one that incorporates jumping from the PPT to the web for live demos, and another that has screencaps of all the websites--the backup in case the internet access doesn't happen.

What I won't have this time around are handouts, for several reasons.

• I'm still making major tweaks to the presentation, even now. Having an overloaded fall quarter and still recovering from a week-long cold didn't help.
• Saving paper, plus I never make the right number of copies. Either too many or not enough, usually the latter because of all the people who slip in before the presentation, grab handouts, and slip out.

I'll post it online when I return (probably the screencap version).