December 13, 2005

RSS: The brass ring for libraries

I've wanted to scream something along these lines at the top of my lungs more than a few times . . .

"RSS is the biggest opportunity we have had since the Web. I’m not kidding you—it’s that big, and if you don’t understand it, you need to. It’s critical that libraries understand RSS." —Jenny Levine, from the Chicago Public Library’s 2005 Scholars in Residence Conference

Read the entire review of Jenny Levine's presentation: The Year of RSS: CPL Scholars, Part 2 via the ALA TechSource blog. It's great stuff.

Posted at 4:44 PM| Permalink

May 16, 2005

Get ::schwagbag:: delivered to your inbox

I aim to please, so for those of you out there who aren't using an aggregator to read blog feeds and are looking for an email alternative, here you go:

email_button.png

It's using RssFwd which I discovered thanks to Paul's RSS to Email post. It piqued my interest because it's written using Ruby on Rails, something I hope to learn a whole lot more about.

I added the button to the sidebar on the blog itself, just beneath the link to RSS. All you need to do is click on the button and wait a couple of seconds for a new page to load. Once the feed verifies, scroll to the bottom of the page and enter your email address. Voila! The feed is supposed to be scraped every 2 hours. Hopefully it's working, if not, please drop me a line.

Though I'm loathe to have even one more thing delivered to my inbox, I can see a real practical application for an RSS to email service. I'm thinking it will come in handy as I get ready to dig in on some of my summer remote/distance service projects and building online content for those user groups. My sense is that not a lot of students know what an aggregator is, let alone use one.

Posted at 3:09 PM| Permalink

March 29, 2005

Tracking faculty publications with CiteULike

I've posted a couple of times (1, 2) about CiteULike because I think it's a great tool. Sitting in a meeting last week discussing future directions for subject pages, it occurred to me that we could track our faculty journal publications using CiteULike. Keeping tabs on journal publications is a notoriously difficult job. CiteULike makes it a little easier by providing a bookmarklet for direct export from a select number of databases (predominantly scientific). So I scanned a few of them, searching by affiliation. For the most part, I had no problems exporting. You can see the results of just a few entries that I've added, here:

CiteULike: UNLV Libraries

I tagged each citation with the appropriate department(s) (for subject-related page feeds) and author-supplied keywords. I used the 'note' field at the bottom of the page to denote which of the authors (when there are multiple) is UNLV-affiliated. The primary purpose is to use this central library for all institutional publications (tagged with the appropriate department) and feed that to appropriate subject pages under the heading of 'new faculty publications' or something like that. The beauty of applications like CiteULike is that once you have the information tagged, you can customize and feed the RSS feeds practically anywhere you like. It's also a great tool for tracking citation behaviour, prolific publishers, etc, etc.

Of course there are always fears that the newest cool tool on the block may be yesterday's news and even disappear. There is an export feature in CiteULike, so keeping backups would be easy enough to do. But to make something like this successful requires participation from a significant number of people, because it is a lot of work. But in the absence of an institutional repository, an effort like this would be of great benefit to the institution, faculty and students. It presents opportunities for even more outreach with faculty and developing relationships with them in keeping up-to-date on their scholarly endeavors.

Posted at 12:35 PM| Permalink

February 17, 2005

Subscribing to an email list (listserv) using Bloglines

Geoff Harder (aka The Blog Driver's Waltz) has just posted an ever so handy guide to using Bloglines to track listservs:

I tried this yesterday with a different set of instructions that I came across, and gave up, dazed and confused. Thanks Geoff!

1) Log into Bloglines

2) Click "Add" (top left-hand corner)

3) Look towards the bottom of the page where it says "Create an Email Subscription"

4) Fill in the blanks (e.g. Name = web4lib; Folder = listservs; ...)

5) Click "Create Email Subscription"

6) NOW, go to the folder that you created and the subsequent title of the feed/page you also just created

7) VOILA. At the top of the page you now have the option to "Send Email" and the ability to include any commands you require (e.g. TO SUBSCRIBE TO WEB4LIB:
Send the message "subscribe Web4Lib your name" to listserv@sunsite.berkeley.edu)

That easy!! You are able to reply, forward and do other standard email functions as well.

As of today, I'm listserv free! Hooray for my inbox!

Posted at 3:36 PM| Permalink

February 10, 2005

Always Fresh: Fast Content for Library Websites with Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Darlene Fichter from the University of Saskatchewan has posted her OLA 2005 Conference talk on the use of RSS in Libraries:

Always Fresh: Fast Content for Library Websites with Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Check out how the University of Saskatchewan posts news on their main webapage (in the green column on the right under 'What's New') and the source of that news: a blog for News and Events (Movable Type). Slide 11 of the presentation looks at how they've beeing using RSS in conjunction with their campus portal - interesting as we're making the move to that very infrastructure at UNLV, though I'm not certain to what extent RSS will be playing a role in it from our end.

USask has also published a list of XML-ified electronic journal titles in a very handy list.

Posted at 10:11 AM| Permalink

January 28, 2005

Library News and Subject Blogs at GSU

Wow, now this is cool: Library News and Subject Blogs at Georgia State University Library. I posted a while back about an article outling the efforts at GSU, but just today caught a glimpse of what they've been up to.

I would love to know what they've used to set this up. Looks like it might be a home-grown application that they've built for their own use, and not a commercially available blogging system. Coooooool!

Posted at 12:17 PM| Permalink

January 27, 2005

Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More

Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More by Nick Finck, Mary Hodder, and Biz Stone provides an excellent overview of how to approach knowledge management in organizations with some of the new slick information/communication tools out there such as blogs and wikis. This presenation provides more than just description, and offers practical and actual examples of usage within each of the authors' respective workplaces/organizations/lives. This is a must-see for anyone interested in these apps or getting one off the ground in their own organization.

An overview:

With so many virtual teams today, along with what some are calling the "collapse of email." Organizations are looking for new and innovative ways for teams to communicate. For many, the integrated communication and information-sharing system that inexpensive Blogs and Wikis provide are just what the doctor ordered. In this session, attendees will learn:

The Resources section points to some great articles. One which I found particularly interesting was Ten things your web sites should be doing by Nick Finch.

Posted at 10:19 AM| Permalink

January 19, 2005

Sirsi gets RSS-ified

Yesterday, I posted about the acquisition of Docutek by Sirsi Corporation. Today, the shifted librarian (Jenny Levine) reports that Sirsi will be the first ILS vendor to offer native RSS feeds out of the catalog. Very exciting news indeed! Here are some of the preliminary features (via the shifted librarian):

The feeds will be part of their Rooms 2.0 and Enterprise Portal Solution (ESP) release around March. Features will include:

The ability to take any OPAC search strategy and convert it into an RSS feed. Because text search engine for our ILS system enables a user to embed MARC and other field codes in the search string, a user could construct a search that searches against title, author, subject, ISBN {020} and any other indexed field within the ILS.

The ability to create an RSS feed based on a search of any sources within SingleSearch, Sirsi's MuseGlobal based federated search product (EBSCO, LoCZ, etc.).

The ability to create an RSS feed of Google results.

The ability to create an RSS feed of our 'Best of the Web'.

The ability to sort the results by date, author, title, or relevance, where applicable.

Posted at 11:02 AM| Permalink

January 11, 2005

Delivering the News with Blogs @ GSU

An interesting article that discusses the use of Blogs in an academic llibrary environment as an alternative news delivery system: "Delivering the News with Blogs: The Georgia State University Library Experience." The article is a preprint, and will be published in Internet Reference Services Quarterly, Volume 10, issue 1 with expected publication in March 2005.

From the abstract:


To deliver information about library news, services and resources to the science faculty and students at Georgia State University, several librarians developed a blog, Science News. Despite the increasing popularity of blogs (or weblogs), few libraries have taken advantage of what they offer. Blogs can be updated easily, frequently and continuously, making them an appealing alternative to static newsletters.

Posted at 7:31 PM| Permalink

December 20, 2004

IngentaConnect gets RSS-ified!

IngentaConnect has recently addedd RSS feeds for both the latest issue and recent issues of its over 28,000 e-journals. RSS feeds can be set up for both subscribed and non-subscribed IngentaConnect titles. Faculty & instructors may find this service useful for keeping track of the TOCs of their favourite publications, and in a case where it's a subscribed title, to get to the full text. Subject librarians might also be interested in integrating feeds such as these into their own subject pages once that functionality is enabled, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.

Example: Library Hi Tech

IngentaConnect also has a Search Plug-in for Firefox.

Posted at 10:08 AM| Permalink

November 23, 2004

FeedFire.com: New tool for creating RSS Feeds

From FeedFire.com:

FeedFire.com will take virtually any web site and convert it into a RSS feed, suitable for use in web pages or RSS news readers. FeedFire is a sophisticated solution that is simple to use, yet powerful, completely automated and customisable. No feed available from the page you would like to syndicate? Easily turn that page into a RSS feed, with no programming knowledge or experience needed.

Posted at 7:11 AM| Permalink

November 11, 2004

Article: What is RSS and how can it serve libraries?

An interesting article on how rss can be used in libraries by Zeki Celikbas. It begins by providing a concise introduction to the history of rss and what exactly it is. It then goes on to explain how to find rss feeds, how to market rss in libraries, and some possible applications for rss in the library (such as current awareness TOC services, rss to improve reference service, and so on).

What is RSS and how can it serve libraries? (PDF)

Posted at 9:48 AM| Permalink

November 10, 2004

RSS Feeds from state.gov

The U.S. Department of State currently has 4 RSS feeds available:

State Department homepage highlights
Press briefings
Press releases
Remarks by the Secretary of State

There is also a blog out there called RSS in Government which offers frequent updates on the use of RSS within various (United States) government sites.

And for government resources outside of the United States, the Government of Canada also has a list of numerous feeds available at the Choose Your News page. The newest addition is a Hurricane RSS Feed.

Posted at 4:16 PM| Permalink

November 8, 2004

Electronic Journal Titles with RSS Feeds

The University of Saskatchewan Library has published a comprehensive list of journal titles with RSS feeds. You can browse the A-Z list and locate journals by title in various subject areas.

As I had suspected, many if not most of these titles are scienctific in nature. The humanities and social sciences are, for the most part, not adopting RSS nearly as readily as their colleagues in the sciences. This is a great project, however, and I'm sure that the list will grow as more and more publishers realize the value of RSS.

Posted at 11:08 AM| Permalink