Webfeeds: Wiley spectroscopyNOW & separationsNOW

Wiley has a suite of feeds for their analytical chemistry portals: spectroscopyNOW.com and separationsNOW.com. For each methods (NMR Spectroscopy, HPLC, etc.) there's a feed for news and another for the e-zine.

Webfeeds: Factiva (revisited)

Still in beta after more in a year, the Factiva Choice feeds are worth a mention. If you have access to Factiva, you can select from 25 industry-specific feeds. For each one, Factiva will select and push out 10-15 articles each week. Some of the feeds have a science/engineering focus: Chemicals, Telecommunications, Energy, Metals/Mining, Aerospace, etc. The entries in the reader should link back to the full text in Factiva. While this is a good way to expose users to a few select articles without innundating anyone, I hope they're planning to offer the capability to create customized search feeds in a future update.

It works fine in FeedDemon, except I need to work out some proxy issues with the off-campus access. However, Bloglines isn't bolding the new content--again.

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).

Webfeed: Thomson Scientific KnowledgeLINK

KnowledgeLINK, Thomson Scientific's new librarian resource site for all things Web of Knowledge, is now available. A feed is available for news and press releases.

Webfeeds: American Chemical Society (sort-of)

I stumbled across some new feeds from several ACS publications. Not for the research articles, but it does at least add substance to the generic "we're working on it" reply I got at SLA. These seem to be the work of a single, talented web editor.

• Journal of Proteome Research now has a feed for the news section, which includes editorials and book reviews.
• Analytical Chemistry has a feed for its monthly "A-Page Magazine" of news and features
• Environmental Science & Technology has 2 feeds: One for its "A-Page" section, the other for the online news section.
  

Google Reader

I've been playing with the new Google RSS reader for about 2 hours. So far, I'm not thrilled with the interface and lack of features. I trust that this is an active beta and that Google will work hard to improve it.

Under the "Home" link, it looks like it can collate all the feeds so you can see all the new, unread entries as a single list, as opposed to the bold (new content) or unbold view that the other readers use. We'll see how well it works.

I imported an OPML file of my Bloglines collection, and the folders I had them in are now "labels," a carryover from Gmail that I really don't like. You can see all of your feeds under the "Your Subscriptions" link, but this has some problems. I can look at a list of entries from a feed, but can't get them to disappear once I've looked at them.

Google has a group running with people posting comments about the reader. I'll check back next week when I return from my vacation.

Webfeed: Chemical & Engineering News

C&EN now has a feed for all of its latest news, not just for their Nanofocus section.