June 05, 2006

Sage Publications: RSS Feeds

Sage Publications (engineering/materials science, medicine, social science/education) now has RSS feeds for their journals. Feeds for the current issue and recent issues for each journal can be found off of that journal's homepage. If there's a single page of feeds, I couldn't find it.

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April 11, 2006

Weaving the Web 2.0: RSS and the Future of Chemical/Science Information

Here's a link to the presentation I gave at last month's American Chemical Society meeting in Atlanta, as part of a CINF session on social computing tools. It was pretty well-attended for an early Sunday morning, with the audience about 50-50 in terms of RSS familiarity.

    Main Points
  • RSS is an information delivery tool that lets you collect and concentrate new content/information in a single location or portal. With an RSS reader, a user can capture new content from a variety of Web 2.0 tools: wikis, blogs, folksonomies, podcasts, etc.
  • If a user, in this case a science/engineering faculty member or student, isn't interested in RSS alerting for these, then substitute those tools for the ones that they will care about: news, databases, e-journals.
  • Using RSS to keep up with information isn't perfect, though it does have some advantages over e-mail alerts. It is another web-related "thing" to do, it's easy to create a backlog (backblog) of stuff that's not going to read itself, and it's not just about collecting information--it's taking that information and transforming it into knowledge that you can apply to your work.
  • The technology's very much in flux. Readers will improve, and their numbers will continue to increase to meet the evolving needs of users and their devices. The feeds will improve, and will include more filtering options (like American Institute of Physics journals where you can select a feed for just one section of a journal). RSS will continue to evolve, and eventually we'll get something "better than RSS." More publishers and vendors will offer RSS-enabled services, which will hopefully include our OPAC vendors.
  • RSS is part of the "bigger picture" of Web 2.0. Users want to customize their web information enviroment: delivery, content, interfaces and devices. We need to incorporate that into the next generation of library (2.0?) websites.
  • What I'd like to see down the road: my library delivering more content to our users' RSS readers. They'd be able to subscribe to feeds for library news, new books, new e-journals and web resources we've added to our future content management system, and even major updates to relevant webpages like databases guides. This content would show up in the reader along with the science feeds (science news, database search updates, and e-journal TOC and article alerts) and anything else outside the library/science sphere.
  • Even better: our users could simply select one feed from from the library (chemistry!). Any feeds or even specific entries that I have tagged "chemistry" would get remixed into a single, seamless feed of information to faculty and students.

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March 19, 2006

EDP Sciences: RSS Feeds

EDP Sciences recently set up feeds for their 30 science journals for tracking recent articles. When I added a few of the feeds to Bloglines, for each one I got entries to about 9-10 seemingly random articles from the last issue. These feeds will probably update for each article rather than the complete TOC.

EDP Sciences includes Astronomy & Astrophysics, Europhysics Letters, and the European Physical Journal collection (Applied Physics + the A-E Journals).

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March 11, 2006

EBSCOhost: RSS Feeds (and why they could be much better)

EBSCO now offers the option to create RSS feeds for search and journal alerts. The great thing is that this includes all of the EBSCOhost databases, including Business Source Premier. The not-so-great thing is that the means to generate and save those feeds is about as convoluted as you can get.

With PubMed, Engineering Village 2 (Inspec and Compendex), and the Astrosphysics Data System, you run your search and get the feed URL to add to your RSS reader. It may take an extra click or two with PubMed, but overall it's not much more complicated than grabbing a feed off the NYT site.

However, EBSCO's made the process more complicated because you have to go through all the steps you'd need to take to create an e-mail search alert. First, you need to login to you My EBSCOhost account, or register for one if you don't already have it. Then you run the search and click the Search History/Alerts tab and follow the steps like you're creating an e-mail search alert. However, when you get to the Email Options, you select No e-mail (RSS only) so that when you save the alert, you get the RSS feed URL to add to your reader. It's the same procedure for creating a journal alert, you can't get the feed until you've signed in to My EBSCOhost.

I'm delighted that EBSCO is moving forward with RSS. At the CLA presentation I gave last November, one of the points that came out of the discussion was that public libraries are more dependent on aggregated collections like EBSCO and ProQuest for access to journal articles than academic libraries that are more likely to subscribe to journals through the publishers' native interfaces. The TOC alert feeds from the publishers just aren't going to be as useful if you have to go through Academic Search Premier to get to the actual articles.

However, it would be much simpler if EBSCO allowed you to capture an RSS feed directly off the search results page.

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February 23, 2006

ACS LiveWire: RSS Feed

There's now a feed for the American Chemical Society's librarian newsletter LiveWire. It should also be noted that they're using the blog format in this issue so readers can post comments to Emily Wixson's article about using the library school practicum experience to foster interest in chemistry librarianship.

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February 15, 2006

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.

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January 23, 2006

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.

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University of California Press - RSS Feeds

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

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January 19, 2006

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.

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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.

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