RSS 101 Articles

2 recent articles on RSS came across my desk this week:

Feed Simple - Washington Post (5/11). He succinctly sums up what needs to happen to increase awareness and use of the technology.

• Make it available on your site, make it easy to understand (what it is, and how to use it), and make it easy for users to subscribe to your feeds.
  

A Guide to Using RSS, Which Helps You Scan Vast Array of Websites - Wall Street Journal via ABI Inform (5/5). More of a general summary about the various readers.

RSS Projects @ ProQuest: Curriculum Match Factor

John Law from ProQuest spoke at a CDL meeting I attended recently. He spoke about their research on student searching habits and needs. RSS came up in the discussion (as it did with Roy Tennant's presentation earlier about metasearching), and John showed us this, their first big RSS project.

If you look at the page itself, you'll see it talks about readers and subscribing to the feeds. But in the presentation, John explained that they envisioned faculty using the feeds by placing them on their own pages, and he had screencaps to illustrate this. Distribution and consumption, vs. consumption alone. For example, someone coming to an accounting professor's website or course webpage would see recent titles of accounting articles with links back to ABI-Inform. Later, I suggested that they needed to include this information on the site as well, screencaps included. People can figure out the whole reader/subscribe thing fairly easily; taking the feed and generating the headlines on your page is trickier.

Have to say it was really great talking with someone from the vendor side who's actually involved with this (and didn't need me to explain it to him). He also said they were working on search-generated feeds for their databases and to be looking for that in the fall. And yes, this includes Dissertation Abstracts.

ProQuest's CMF is definitely going into the presentation. Not only do the feeds link into a subscription database, but it's also a business database and my examples are so heavily skewed toward the sciences.

Webfeeds for Science Librarians

A while back, Randy asked when I was going to put together a page of webfeeds relevant to science librarians. I started working on it, and realized very quickly it's just not practical. Any time I have to work on webpages must be used for higher-priority activities:

1. Web stuff related to my job as chemistry librarian
2. SLA Chem Division

So this project came out of my Bloglines reorganization: a second collection focusing just on webfeeds relevant to science librarians, either for their own reading or of potential interest to their patrons. I've got quite a few in there already, sorted into categories. The only drawback to that there's no way to track new additions short of blogging them.

I'm also experimenting with a social bookmarking option which would allow this tracking, although it means keeping a feedlist current in two places.

Skype!

If you aren't using Skype yet, I strongly urge you to give it a try. It is soooo cool. I'm using it now to talk to two former colleagues at Georgia State while we work on an article, and the clarity is amazing. It's like they're in the cube next to me, not across the country. I can certainly see job candidates down the road asking if they can Skype their phone interviews.

A couple of things we discovered:

• Definitely take the time to test it out before you really need to use it. It may take several tries to get mic/headphone connections correct on your CPU. And if you're CPU is on the floor and under the desk like mine, the headphones are probably going to stay connected.
• The second time we tried it out, Doug and I couldn't hear each other (and were using IM as a backup to figure out what was going on). We each closed out Skype and reopened it and that seemed to fix it.
  

Webfeeds: PubMed/NLM (coming soon)

Steven beat me to the punch on this announcement, but the May/June NLM Technical Bulletin has a nice screencap-rich preview of their upcoming webfeed service for PubMed. The RSS Feed option will be part of the Send drop-down menu you get with the results (along with e-mail, clipboard, etc.). You'll get to a page where you can customize your feed a bit, then it generates the feed and give you the orange XML box. You take care of the rest.

I'll probably demonstrate HubMed for the library presentation I'm doing Thursday, but this is a very nice piece of news.

Webfeeds: SD Union-Tribune

Turns out the San Diego Union-Tribune has a wealth of feeds, though the deceptively generic "Local News" feed probably needs to be split in two: one for all city government/scandal news, and one for everything else.

I am surprised that they didn't set one up for biotech like the Seattle Times did. Between UCSD, Scripps, Salk, Pfizer, etc., this would be more useful than that feed for the Buick Invitational.

Webfeeds: Astrophysics Data System

Ooohh, another database has gone RSS. Now I'll have three to show for my class on Thursday, along with Compendex and HubMed.

Run a search, then go down to the very end of the page. You'll see the orange XML box with the feed link that you can capture. It looks you can create the search to run against any combination of the 4 databases, including the arXiv e-prints (which has its own set of specialized feeds on its site).

Webfeeds with Compendex/EI Village 2

As Randy points out, the introduction of feeds as a search alert option EI Village 2 means that librarians who work with engineering faculty and students now have to be able to explain this feature to their users. I think it also has wider implications. Now that one of our subscription databases offers this feature (Inspec's on another platform at UCSD), when will our other vendors follow? Somebody brought this up at a meeting I attended last month...for SciFinder Scholar, no less.

We met with our EV2 rep last week, and I offered several comments about the feeds.

• Embed the feed link in the orange box. When many of us see that box, we just right-click to copy the feed, which won't work here since the embedded link just opens up another page.
• If they want to continue this setup, with the XML feed appearing on that second page, then it should at least be a hyperlink so it's easier to copy.

It's also pushing things ahead here. Next month I'm presenting something on RSS/Webfeeds as reference forum that will not only be attended by my Science & Engineering colleagues, but also from other librarians from among our 10 or so branches. And next week I'm co-teaching my first "Current Awareness" class. We'll be covering both e-mail alerts and webfeeds, and I've been thinking about how to keep it all simple and not to get bogged down in the techie stuff.

We'll start with the email-based search and TOC alerts first, and then move to the webfeeds. But do I start with Compendex or with one of the publishers like IOP?. I haven't decided yet, but I also plan to include science news sources in the discussion and point out the value of "capturing the feeds" as a more manageable way of keeping up rather than e-mail.

"Weblogs: Their Use and Application In Science and Technology Libraries"

Congrats to Randy and Geoff on the publication of their article, published in the newest issue of Science & Technology Libraries (preprint). I look forward to reading it this week.

And on a similar note, our Haworth-published article about blogs has been pushed back to August (sigh).

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??