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.

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.