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