Webfeeds: American Physical Society Journals

Another physics society with journal feeds!!

APS now has "new article" feeds for their journals: Phys. Rev. Lett., Phys. Rev. A-E, and Phys. Rev. ST AB. They have also created an "Editor Selects" feed for Phys. Rev. C to highlight notable articles from the other Phys. Rev. journals for their readers.

So now there's IOP, APS, and AIP (news only, but I wouldn't be surprised to see journal feeds in the very near future). Which begs the question: why haven't ACS and RSC doing the same thing??

The First Lesson of 2005

When you move across the country and start a new job, take the time you expect to get back on track with your projects and multiply it by at least 4 or 5. This will give you actual time it will take you to get back on track. It's been about 6 weeks since I moved to San Diego and started at the library, and it feels like 6 months. And I'll be feeling all of that in the next few days when I FINALLY catch up in Bloglines.

Webfeeds: Science Magazine

Yes!! Science has finally launched their feeds. They have the new issue TOC, of course, plus some additional ones for NetWatch and the ScienceNOW headlines. They've also set them up for their Next Wave section if you want to track career developements (minorities, US, UK, etc).

ACS now moves to the top of my journal publisher wishlist.

Testing the new URL

I finally went ahead and changed the URL to the blog. We'll see what problems ensue. I kept the old "georgiasla" URL for now, but for redirecting purposes.

One odd thing I noticed. The user view looks wildly (and unintentinally) different in IE than it does in Netscape or FireFox. Another IE annoyance.

Another Short Hiatus

Dec. 23 was my last working day at Georgia State University. I'm very excited about my new position (not to mention leaving Atlanta after 20 years), but I'm also leaving behind some great colleagues and exciting projects like our blogs and content management system. I've had a very rewarding and productive 3.5 years as a science/reference librarian at GSU, and along with that work experience I have the articles, poster sessions and presentations to show for it.

The computer gets boxed up tomorrow afternoon for the movers who are coming Thursday. I fly out on Friday and start at UCSD Monday morning. If all goes well, I'll be posting next week.

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.