Here's a quick and easy way to augment your Government Documents collection: FirstGov, the U.S. Government's web portal, now offers RSS feeds in a range of subjects. Each of these broad topics has a number of entries underneath -- and they're obviously planning for a lot more:

• Agriculture RSS Feeds
• Consumer RSS Feeds
• Cyber Security RSS Feeds
• Data and Statistics RSS Feeds
• Education RSS Feeds
• Federal Personnel RSS Feeds
• Health RSS Feeds
• International Relations RSS Feeds
• Military RSS Feeds
• Forest RSS Feeds
• Science RSS Feeds

So if you're interested in Product Safety Recalls (XML) or National Agricultural Statistics Service News (XML) -- or lots of other stuff -- here's your place to go.

What a simple way to keep your patrons up to date on whatever part of the bureaucracy is of interest to them...

[Updated 19 May 2005 to correct URLs which I'd butchered by mistake.]

The University of Montana's Mansfield Library maintains the Government News for Montana weblog. A group of four librarians at Montana institutions keep it updated with new legislation and other information pertinent to the state government. And, of course, updates are available via RSS.

The folks who run Engineering Village sent out a press release today, announcing that Engineering Village 2 now offers customized RSS feeds to subscribers. According to the release (at this writing, not available on their web site), "Subscribers are now able to define their own searches against comprehensive engineering databases including Compendex(r) and Inspec(r), and receive results delivered directly via RSS." This brings EI up to where many other major providers have already arrived.

However, a nice additional feature they have added is a tool to create an HTML code from an article in their database that can be inserted into a blog:

This new too, live today, generates the necessary code to link to an article -- and a small EI2 image. The URL to the article is not an OpenURL, however. That would be a nice feature to offer customers who access articles through site-licensed organizations. If they know who you are when you find the citation, they should generate the URL with that organization's resolver in place. But a great start, nonetheless.

The University of Saskatchewan offers an extensive list of electronic journals with RSS feeds -- hundreds of them, sorted alphabetically. If you're thinking of adding journal TOCs to your catalog, or elsewhere on the web, this is a great resource for figuring out which journals are offering RSS options. Clicking a title takes you to an information page displaying UofS's journal holdings for that title, a link to the RSS feed, and the most recent table of contents with abstracts (generated by that same RSS feed, I'll wager). Nice use of the tools!

Tobe Liebert at the Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas School of Law, offers an RSS Feed of his Current Copyright Literature site. He citations and (for the first 60 days after publication) a scanned first page of the article.

Amanda Etches-Johnson at BlogWithoutaLibrary.net maintains a bibliography of RSS-related articles and books. Check out her exhaustive collection of articles about blogging & RSS in the library world. If you're looking for thought-starters -- or literature to support your desire to use blogs and RSS -- this is a great place to start.

She updates her furl archive more frequently than the blog page.

Steven Cohen at LibraryStuff points us to the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page, and specifically to the RSS Feed for new books listed.

The Online Books Page -- completely new to me -- lists more than 20,000 full-text English-language books available around the Internet. While only the new books listing is available via RSS, the site itself lists them by author, subject, title, and LC subject heading.

Probably not new news for most, but EBSCO is now offering RSS feeds in their search alert tool -- so you can now save your frequent searches as RSS feeds.

There's a comprehensive, subject-based listing of medical and health RSS feeds. This advertising-supported site provides subject listings of RSS feeds, covering medical journals and news sites. If you're looking to build a "what's new" service based on medical feeds, this is a good site to mine for sources.

I received a press release from the folks at ScienceDirect announcing their "TOP25" service:

I have two complaints, one minor, one major. The minor one first -- a quarterly updating to the alert may make sense, but more frequent updates would be better. Particularly in regard to my major complaint.

My major complaint is that receiving these alerts by email is all well and good -- but where's the RSS? If done properly, a library could get RSS feeds for use on a subject guide, for example, that include OpenURL links links, pre-formatted for the library's link resolver. That would drive visitors to the ScienceDirect site and make my life easier.

UPDATE 13 November 2006 10:00 AM: In response to my email (with similar suggestions oulined above) to ScienceDirect, I received a reply from Brant Emery, the TOP25 Project Manager at ScienceDirect. He wrote (quoted with his permission):

So stay tuned...

Library Stuff notes that the Library of Congress now has RSS Feeds -- so far, these are news and information feeds about the LOC, along with current patent legislation and Federal Register notices.

Wouldn't a new books by LC call number feed be a great thing to have as a collection development tool?

The European Union's Press Office has launched a large number of RSS feeds for press releases (by EU political domain), commissioners' speeches, and European institutions. And, to top it all off, there's a single feed for the day's press releases.

The first time I looked at this site using Safari, I couldn't grab the RSS feeds. When I opened it in Firefox, though, I saw a clever use of navigation -- when I moved the mouse over the RSS icon, a menu appeared listing all the European Union languages that feed was available in. Some feeds are available in all of them, others in a subset. Very nice -- though it would be nice if the JavaScript worked on all platforms. (The feeds themselves work in Safari, but only if you can find them...)

WisBlawg's Bonnie Shucha points us to a May 2006 item at Library Boy: RSS feeds for pending legislation in the Canadian parliament.

To see it in action, go to the LEGISINFO site and click on any of the lists of bill under "Senate" or "House of Commons" on the left side the screen. The result is, not surprisingly, a list of bills under consideration. The pleasant surprise is that each bill comes with an RSS feed to update you whenever that bill's status changes.

I'm impressed. Perhaps there's a similar tool in the U.S. Library of Congress's THOMAS legislative toolset, but I can't find it. I should note that they are working on a new search interface that allows searching by topic or legislator, the search results are not "RSSified." (See "About the New THOMAS" to learn more -- and try out -- the new search tools.) It seems foolish to launch a search service without allowing an RSS feed of the search results to your users.

Are there are other national or local governments that offer legislation tracking via RSS? Leave a note in the comments and I'll compile a list.

Update 11 Apr 2007 Changed link to LEGISINFO page to go directly to legislation.

Gale databases now offer RSS feeds for your searches -- and, as well they should, include your institution's proxy server in the full-text URL. Which means, of course, that if you set up the RSS feed as an authorized user for your institution, you'll be able to get to the full text of new items on- or off-premises.

Note the RSS icon and "Create a Search Alert" text in the upper right of the image.

RSS feeds do not seem to be available in all Gale databases; it is present (in the example above) in Academic OneFile, but not in, for example, Biography and Genealogy Master Index.

The U.S. Census Bureau launched a set of RSS feeds -- see the census feeds directory. Along with news releases by topic and general Census information, the site currently offers three podcasts, including a daily Profile America podcast (also in Spanish: Al Día).

The Library of Congress's Law Library of Congress now offers RSS Feeds on the following topics: News & Events, Research Reports, Webcasts, and Global Legal Monitor.

The "Research Reports" feed, for example, includes such topics as "How to Do Russian Legal Research" and "Children’s Rights: International Laws."

These new feeds are just a small portion of the complete list of Library of Congress RSS Feeds.

EUFeeds is a special-purpose RSS aggregator for European newspapers that provides access to more than 300 papers from the European Union. Provided by the European Journalism Centre in the Netherlands, this site lets you quickly browse the print media from each EU member nation.

The site defaults to UK newspapers; there is no apparent way to set a different country as your default entry page. It also does not provide an RSS feed for the aggregated content -- so you cannot subscribe to the aggregated Czech Republic news, only visit it on a web page.

The Combined Arms Research Library at Fort Leavenworth now has an RSS feed for new items in their digital library. The feed, at http://cgsc.leavenworth.army.mil/CARL/rss/generate_rss.asp?feed=carl_dl, includes items from their military history, MA of Military Art & Sciences theses, World War II Operational Documents, and more.

There's a wealth of information here... And if you ever want to know how the Army measured soldiers' feet during World War I, here's your chance to find out: Army foot measuring and shoe fitting system.

A new search engine created by ex-Googlers went public today: Cuil, pronounced, the site tells us, "cool;" it's the Gaelic for "knowledge." (And "hazel," which seems less relevant.) The site seems to be suffering a bit from newcomer's paralysis -- the info page is currently not loading and some searches are timing out. Cuil claims to have indexed 120 billion pages, more than Google (which knows about over a trillion, but only indexes a small portion -- though just how small, or large, Google's not saying).

At first blush, I like Cuil's layout. It presents results in two or three columns (you decide). Many results come with a small thumbnail image. In some cases, though, the image was of questionable relationship to the search; images were not present on the page you link to in a few cases. How images are applied is a mystery to me.

A search for ""University of Michigan Library"" (a phrase, including the quotes) finds it. It also presents "categories" of results on the right, with nicely bundled results.

However, its currency is a bit poor, at least for low-traffic sites like RSS4Lib. A search at Cuil for RSS4Lib pulls up the main page as the first result, but the text shown dates from October 2007, quite a few posts ago).

There's no apparent way to save a search alert (by email or RSS), which is unfortunate, as that seems to me to be just part of doing business. The interface, though, is quite clean and (at least for now) free of advertising. I'll be curious to see how this new search tool develops.

For those of you who enjoying poring through your servers log files, Cuil is powered by the "twiceler" crawler you may noticed going through your site.