Month: July 2005

Directory of Journals with RSS Feeds

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!

[Via TP Wireservice.]

TOCs in the Catalog via RSS

Jim Robertson at the New Jersey Institute of Technology Library is pulling recent journal tables of contents into his catalog using RSS. In a recent posting to the Web4Lib listserv, he provides several links to see what he’s doing:

I’ve also (partially) successfully sucked in live, on-the-fly RSS feeds for tables of contents. Still “tweaking”, but you can see at http://www.library.njit.edu/catalog/shortcut.cfm?issn=1046-4883 (click on DETAILED RECORD).

Once you click through to the Detailed Record view, scroll down — and there’s the latest TOC for the journal (in this example, it’s the Journal of Architectural Education). Jim is using ColdFusion to, in his words, “hack some interesting things in Endeavor’s Voyager.” He’s also using Feed2RSS to turn the RSS feed into usable HTML.

Engineering Village and 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:

The introduction of RSS feeds to EV2 expands upon the platform’s integration of the newest technologies to support engineering researchers with effective tools not commonly offered by traditional A&I services. Recognizing the potential of weblogs or blogs in the research process Engineering Village 2 is also offering a new “Blog this” feature supporting researchers in posting references to Engineering Village 2 documents to their personal blogs. Once researchers identify article references of interest, Engineering Village 2 will automatically generate HTML code to be pasted into a blog and contains a direct link to the referenced document. “Blog this” was created to support the growing number of engineering researchers using blogs as web based communication tools.

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.

Atom Officially Ready for Prime Time

Or, in the words of Tim Bray, its steward, “It’s cooked and ready to serve.” Atom is another data format for accomplishing similar things to what RSS does — promoting content, distributing “what’s new” feeds, and so forth. What are the differences? Well, they’re largely technical and largely irrelevant to the end user.
A couple of the features that differentiate Atom over RSS are:

  • Atom has a standardized method of auto-discovery (of finding the feeds that relate to a given web page).
  • Atom is an XML namespace — which means entries can themselves contain formatted XML text without having to escape all the characters. This will be a boon to data reuse via webfeed.

The full range of differences is in an easy-to-understand comparison of RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0.
The key thing is that feed readers and aggregators will soon be accepting Atom 1.0 feeds (they often understand the current version of Atom — 0.3).

[Via Inessential.]

Update — Ann Arbor District Library & RSS

Ed Vielmetti let me know that the Ann Arbor District Library catalog and blog combination is up and running.

You can browse the catalogablog (with apologies to David Bigwood) without a login. Library staff post books to the blog, and library patrons can add their own comments. Blogs are provided, at this writing, for books, audio, and video, with breakdowns by age within each section. All subscribable, of course, by RSS.

Library Blogs in Courseware

Stephen Bell makes a great point in his 2005 ALA poster presentation, “If Youæ± e Going To Blog, Blog It To Courseware“:

Do you already have a library weblog (blog) or are you considering using one to create awareness about library services and resources. That’s great because a blog can be a powerful marketing and awareness tool. Now, how are you going to get your user community to read the blog. Realistically, the library’s weblog is unlikely to be perceived as so vital that students and faculty will choose to follow it regularly by bookmarking the blog site or otherwise visiting it regularly. This poster session describes how a library weblog can be integrated into campus courseware (e.g., Blackboard, WebCT). Using software that converts blog content into HTML code the library weblog output can be directly added to students’ course sites.

I’ve described such RSS-to-HTML software in a previous post. And I’m going to try doing exactly what Steve suggests in our school’s Blackboard implementation. I’ll let you know what happens.

[Via Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki]

Rhode Island Libraries

The Rhode Island Office of Library and Information Services offers Rhode Island-wide library news and information via its Rhodarian blog. From their site:

We are Rhode Island librarians and our mission is to post items that are of interest to the general RI library community, categorized so that you can find content in your area of interest.

According to the Oh!Libraries (Ohio Libraries) blog, similar services are offered by at least four other states’ libraries: Idaho, Indiana, Utah, and Ohio.

California Library Events by RSS

The Infopeople Project in California offers RSS feeds for its events calendar. The calendar draws from a variety of sources and includes individual RSS feeds for workshops, conferences, webcasts, and online courses. They list their feeds in one handy place.
While this is specific to California (except the library conferences feed), it shows a nice integration of a calendar, on-screen display of useful information, and RSS feeds.

Journal Tables of Contents via RSS

The Ebling Health Sciences Library at the University of Wisconsin offers a list of medical and science journals that have RSS feeds. The list of titles with RSS feeds. The library subscribes to the feeds and presents the most recent table of contents on the screen. Each article is linked through the library’s proxy server to the full text content available to library patrons. And, of course, there’s a link to the actual RSS feed from the publisher. (This publisher-provided feed, of course, does not link through the library’s proxy server.)
Presumably, with a big more data massaging, the RSS feed could direct patrons through an OpenURL link resolver to the most appropriate source of the journal (online, interlibrary loan, etc.).