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Welcome to RSS4Lib's new home, rss4lib.com! This is where all the action will be -- the old site, http://blogs.fletcher.tufts.edu/rss4lib/, is now static. Please update your RSS reader to use one of the new feeds:
Thanks for reading.
Ken Varnum
ken@rss4lib.com
This may be of benefit to, primarily, special librarians, but it's worth a thought for any librarian wishing to make a positive impression on whatever group or person is responsible for funding... David Rothman, in his blog focusing on medical librarianship, notes how easy it is to provide a quality current awareness service to one's organization. A simple search at a news aggregator (that is, an aggregator that actually handles just "official" news sources, not the broader blogosphere) can populate a web page with recent headlines and links to the full-text articles.
Rothman recommends FeedGit, which aggregates these "official" news sources. Enter a search term. You'll see a list of news providers grouped by type (news, web, blogs, images, etc.). For each content type, there are links to an RSS feed specifically on your search term at each of the providers.
Putting this feed on a web page is the next step that Rothman notes -- don't even bother the decision makers with the raw RSS (unless, of course, they've already joined that bandwagon). User your favorite RSS-to-HTML script (mine is Feed2JS), tailor the style to match your own site, and tell the world (or the individual) that it's there. Voilà! A quick-and-dirty clipping service.
ZapTXT (a beta product -- but aren't they all?) is a new service that lets you set up a keyword search of specific RSS feeds and send you an alert -- by email, instant messenger, or text message to a mobile device -- when those keywords appear in that feed. ZapTXT provides a list of popular news feeds (for example, Technology contains about 20 pre-selected feeds, including Engadget, Pogue's Posts, Resource Shelf, and more; Political Blogs contains Wonkette, Daily Kos, and a bunch of others). You can pick multiple sites using the preselected lists. Alternately, you can specify your own favorite feed source. To add multiple personally selected sources, first create the feed, then edit it to add additional RSS sources.
Email alerts go to any email address. IM alerts only go to Jabber, Gtalk and MSN clients -- leaving out AOL's instant messenger. Test messaging is available for all major cell service providers.
With a carefully constructed set of keywords, this is another great clipping service substitute.
Addendum: Sameer Patel of ZapTXT sent me the following helpful tip -- a simple way to search the ENTIRE blogosphere for a keyword. In his words:
You are now monitoring a search term across the entire blogsphere. And if you select "as they appear" when you're setting up your ZapTask, that's exactly what happens. With this method, you're monitoring the entire post of all blogs that Sphere catches. So if ZapTXT showed up deep in the body of the post, the RSS feed from Sphere catches that as part of the result and you get a ZapTXT alert.
Looking for a source of book reviews to put on your library site? Or perhaps just looking for a review of a recently published book? A source I just stumbled on, Reader's Club, has just that: more than 2000 book reviews written by librarians and library staff at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina since 1998.
Reviews are categorized by genre. And, the reason this is germane here -- every genre has an RSS feed. That's more than 50 genre-based feeds available through the RSS Feeds Directory. Feeds are limited to books added in the past 45 days, but the complete list of reviews is searchable via the web site.
Whether this is a project to emulate within your own library, or great source of reviews to aid in collection development or to provide patrons, this is a great idea.
The History Librarian raises an interesting question in his brief post, "Using RSS Feeds: Librarians vs. Historians." History Librarian notes that of the Project Muse feeds he monitors, the library-themed ones have many more (15, 23, and 43) subscribers than the history-related ones (6, 1, 4, and 4). Are librarians far ahead of the researchers we support in terms of RSS adoption -- and is this a good or a bad thing?
I would say it's good or bad depending on the efforts we make to educate our clientele on the benefits of the tool. To the extent that we (we librarians, I mean) inform our customers of ways they can do their research and current awareness-building more effectively, it's a good thing. If, however, we're merely talking and reading amongst ourselves... Well, this may not be a bad thing, but it probably isn't a good thing, either.
Then again, I'd wager that most libraries public catalogs show similar usage patterns to ours: the advanced search page is rarely used, but most of that infrequent use is by librarians... Which is not to say the catalog is a failure or pointless, just that it works well enough for the average user.
RSS4Lib is written by Ken Varnum. Contact Ken.
