Man, I could go on for days about how you should really embrace feeds and readers, how they're a part of any healthy internet routine, how it was as if the heavens did open and, lo, a beam of heavenly light did illuminate my pointy little head with inspiration when I first experienced the divine joy of RSS feeds, and how much extra bar time I've gained by using them. Lucas' post and the explanation on Becker's Learning 2.0 site, however, already give a pretty good overview of the advantages of getting friendly with feeds. And plus, as (I feel like) I keep saying, your mileage is going to vary on how you might use these tools, anyway.
As far as incorporating them into our patrons' internet usage, however... Well, here's a couple things I was thinking of.
First off, most of the Electronic Journals we have have and allow access to have RSS feeds available in varying degrees. For instance, the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism has three feeds available, one for the current issue, one for recent issues, and one for advance access to special "ahead of print" articles. Applied Psychopathology and Biofeedback has feeds for nearly way you could request information from them, from the latest articles to specific feeds for each of their article categories. While these features are a great way to keep students and faculty up to date with the latest research and information, there are a couple of things to keep in mind should we decide to pitch them to our patrons.
- The patron must be on the Washington University Medical School Network or logged in to the Becker Proxy to have access to the Full Text. An oldie but goodie, that one. Same rule applies to the feedreaders and RSS feed. Sure, you can subscribe to the feed and even access the feed's information from anywhere, but if a patron want to be able to follow the link to the Full Text PDF, they'll have to be on teh network or proxy (or, of course, have their own subscription to the journal).
- The feed the patron subscribes to must be the one provided when Linked Out from the Becker Medical Library website. A lot of our Full Access to the e-journals comes from places like ScienceDirect, rather than from the journal itself. So if a patron wanted to subscribe to the feed for Journal of American College of Cardiology though the ACTUAL JOURNAL SITE, they would not have access to the full text PDF. The patron must get to the journal through our record for the journal, link out from the web address provided, then subscribe to the feed provided there.
Just make sure you don't get too carried away, or at least have an efficient folder system to collect like topics, because you can receive a ton of stories you don't care about just to get to three or four really interesting and/or pertinent ones.It's true. There are a ton of feeds out there for everything you can think of, all easily subscribed to. While most feed readers make it fairly easy to organize collections of feeds in different folders or tabs, it is still pretty easy to be inundated with a whole bunch of information you'll probably never use. It really pays to be frugal about what you subscribe to so that you don't get overwhelmed. Instead of immediately subscribing to something, bookmark the web site it comes from first. If you find yourself returning to that site a lot, THEN consider subscribing. It's a pretty good way of deciding whether or not a site is really useful or just a passing fancy.
One search engine that may be helpful to our patrons is MedWorm, a Medical RSS search engine AND Web-based Feedreader in one.
MedWorm aggregates information collected by thousands of medical related-feeds into one place and provides several filters and options to sift through it all. It also allows users to subscribe to specific search queries so that any new information that comes up pertaining to, say, the "reanimation of dead tissue" shows up in your personal reader. Medworm is also it's very own feedreader, too, should you choose to sign up for an account. You can get more details here.
And, as a side note, librarians can also get some help in the RSS field by clicking over to LibWorm, a MedWord clone that provides a search engine and feeds based on about 1,500 libraries, library blogs, and other library based web sites. A very useful tool for those interested in the library sciences. More details, anyone?
2 comments:
Good point about needing to route users through the proxy server. What do you think about Ebling Library's portal for RSS feeds (http://ebling.library.wisc.edu/rss/index.cfm?panel=2)? Should we attempt something similar at Becker (using hyperlinks through our proxy server, of course)?
Personally, I think it would be awesome, Ellen.
This did get me thinking, though. I wonder if we in the Digital Initiatives Group should be brainstorming a way of gauging the tools and apps already used by our patrons, both faculty and students. Also, we should also be think about how to present these new tools to every here at Wash U. It's great to offer things like an RSS Portal , but if no one knows what it is, how it works, or that it even exists, it helps no one.
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