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.

"Delivering the News with Blogs: The Georgia State University Library Experience"

Doug Goans has placed a preprint of our forthcoming article on the Georgia State University Library's website. The preprint process was new to us, but I believe we have crossed and dotted our I's and T's to keep in line with Haworth's policy on author preprint rights. The final article should be out early next year in Internet Reference Services Quarterly.

This was a long, difficult article to write and rewrite. I spent so much time at Borders with my checked-out laptop, I'm surprised they didn't put me to work. The Computers in Libraries article was a breeze in comparison, once we got the article down to the specified word limit. We had some excellent people here in the library who read our drafts and offered constructive (brutal, but in a good way) criticism. Jane Schille, the IRSQ editor, was also very patient with our questions and revisions.

We had received a few warnings about the publisher, but the turnaround time from acceptance to publication--just under a year--is amazing. However, there has been once major change since we submitted the article: the number of blogs has more than tripled since March.

Enjoy, and please feel free to contact Doug or me if you have any questions or comments.

Webfeed Roundup for November (part 2)

More government feeds. I'm still surprised that the CDC hasn't joined this list. I've contacted a tech person there (someone my mother works with) to see if he knows who I should contact at the CDC to ask about this.

• The Wired article on government agencies and RSS mentioned NASA. They currently have 3 feeds: Breaking News, Image of the Day, and Science @ NASA. For the Image feed, you get a link to the picture but not the picture itself. The Breaking News feed is a must-read for astronomy and other science librarians.
• The FDA has a feed for recalls, market withdrawls and safety alerts. Don't forget that the Consumer Product Safety Commission also has a feed for product recalls.
• Another one of the "agency I've never heard of category" and also mentioned in the article, the National Agricultural Statistics Service proudly announced their new feed for news and announcements. I'm glad to see that government agencies are moving forward with this, the piecemeal aspect of this movement is not encouraging. Ideally, the feeds should be offered at the top level (here, the USDA), with the news from the 17 agencies funneled upward.

SFX OpenURL Generator to Publicize Faculty Research

Shane Nackerud at University of Minnesota demonstrated at the Internet Librarian conference how faculty can use the SFX Link Resolver to create links to articles that can be posted to class websites (blogs, WebCT, etc.).

You can also do this with the SFX OpenURL Generator. I get a weekly report from Web of Science with citations to new articles written by GSU faculty. I copy a citation into the blog, enter the article's DOI into the OpenURL Generator, and copy the generated URL into the blog as the link for the article title. The result: a nice biweekly to monthly list of recently published articles by our university's science faculty, with links to the articles. If we only have the articles in print, I use a Voyager canned search generator to create a URL for the journal title.

RSS Edges Into the Bureaucracy

A brief but interesting article on how recognized and obscure government agencies are using feeds to deliver information. Winer's comment that 2% of internet users are also RSS users is probably accurate. Definitely higher among librarians, but probably not by much (but I'd guess that awareness in the sense of "I've heard of it" would be closer to 50%).

"People will subscribe to many feeds, and in the course of receiving that information, they find that there's something interesting on (an agency's) site, and they'll go there."

Currently RSS is used by a relatively small number of people, but that may change as it is built into web browsers like Safari and Firefox. Some feel that one company in particular can go further in bringing RSS to the masses.

Weblogs/RSS 101 & 201

Steven has posted the PPT of the preconference presentations he gave with Jenny Levine at the Internet Librarian conference. The PDF and HTML versions should be available shortly. The first part is a very basic introduction to blogs in libraries, with lots of screencaps showing examples (thanks for including ours). I wonder with an audience like this if any of this was new material. The second part is more about the technical and policy aspects of marketing and managing your blog, and there's some very useful information here. I haven't done much with the keyword customization feeds other than HubMed, but I may try some of the others they listed.