PBWiki

I've been having a lot of fun lately with PBWiki. It's a free, hosted wiki service that lets you get comfortable with all the bells and whistles of wikiness without getting your library involved in supporting it. However, you can use it later on to demonstrate what said library could do if the technology was available to the library staff.

I set up a wiki for the group of us in the Science & Engineering Library: our reference team of 7 librarians and library assistants, and our administrative assistant. It's filling a niche for document creation and sharing (easy editing + remote access), and I'm hoping that my colleagues will take further advantage as they get used to the formatting quirks that come with editing a wiki.

Some of the documents we've created so far:

• Draft policy for our upcoming browsing collection
• Links to resources and reading material for our public space redesign project, including a combined reference/circ desk
• A list of links we frequently use at the reference desk to assist patrons. Instead of having to rely on post-it notes on our desk or having to navigate various library and university websites, we have all of them on a single page with an easy-to-remember URL.
  

Tags: wikis | collaboration

College and University Feed Directory

If you want to see how institutions of higher education are using RSS to deliver news, blog content, and even podcasts, then check out the directory at Thomson Peterson's. There are 16 categories and a search engine.

They've also set up a feed to keep track of additions to the directory, and another for their Syndication for Higher Education blog.

Tags: Thomson Peterson's | RSS Feeds | Higher Education | Colleges | Universities | Podcasts

University of California Press - RSS Feeds

The UC Press now has feeds for their collection of social science and humanities journals.

Tags: University of California Press | RSS Feeds | Journals

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press - RSS Feeds

CSHL Press also has feeds for their journals: Genome Research, Learning & Memory, Protein Science, RNA, and Genes & Development. Like the ASBMB journals, the RSS box on the journal homepage is not the feed URL, but a link to the page where the feeds are listed.

Tags: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press | RSS Feeds | Journals

American Association for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology - RSS Feeds

ASBMB now has feeds for 3 of their journals: Journal of Biological Chemistry, Journal of Lipid Research, and Molecular & Cellular Proteomics. If you access the feeds from the journal homepages, you'll get a generic explanation page and an orange RSS box. This is not the feed! You'll need to click the box to get to the actual feed URLs.

Tags: American Association for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology| RSS Feeds | Journals

American Chemical Society Journals - RSS Feeds

ACS now has RSS feeds for all their journals. There are also links on the individual journal homepages, but these either go back to their main RSS/e-mail alert page, or to the list of feeds themselves (don't right-click to copy the link on the RSS button).

ACS states that the feeds are for "the Articles ASAP and the complete Tables of Contents of all of its journals." I've added a few feeds, and they are indeed a mix of individual articles with DOI's and links to TOC's when the issues are available. I've come across a few minor glitches (like a "null" title field for Accounts of Chemical Research), but otherwise this is a most welcome addition.

Tags: American Chemical Society | RSS Feeds | Journals

Webfeeds: chemistry.org/ACS

The American Chemical Society now has a page for all of their feeds, including C&EN and some previous news and A-page content. They also have a "What's new" feed for the chemistry.org site, and another for Patent Watch page of new chemical patents.

Note: the orange RSS button on many of the chemistry.org pages will only take you to the page of available feeds. It's a URL for an HTML page, not for the RSS feed itself.

Tags: RSS | American Chemical Society

For those of us who think that blogging or RSS is "so 2003/2004..."

At the CARL South Mini Conference today, I asked about 90-100 librarians if they have blogs at their libraries. Less than 10 said yes. Later, one of the RSS presenters asked who was familiar with or using RSS, even fewer hands went up. Interesting reality check.

Web Clips (RSS) on Gmail

Google just added this feature to Gmail. You can now set it up to have feed headlines ("web clips") showing up at the top of your Gmail inbox and when you're looking at individual messages. They have some preselected feeds, which you can manually delete, and there's an option to select ones of your own.

Sorry, but I prefer to keep my e-mail and RSS reading separate. Having these headlines pop-up while I'm checking Gmail just doesn't do anything for me. I'd prefer something a little more practical--like being able to move my e-mail out Inbox and into folders.

More webfeeds for IEEE Spectrum Magazine

I was aware of the IEEE Spectrum "newest article" feed because it's part of IEEE Explore, but the magazine has an additional feed service on its own website. It's billed as an industry feed; you can select the all-industry feed or select 1-16 industries to create something more customized.