Month: January 2006

The January 2006 web version of RefWorks has a new feature for citing weblog entries. Under the site’s Search menu is a new tool for RSS feeds. Using this tool, you give it an RSS feed and then select which items in that feed you want to build citations for. It gives you the author, title, permanent URL, full text abstract from the RSS feed, along with fields for other information important for citing something as ephemeral as some blog posts can be (such as date accessed). Citations of weblogs can now be handled by RefWorks just like any other source.

A post on TechCrunch (“FeedXS – RSS for Everyone“) pointed me to FeedXS. This is a new service that claims to make it simple for anyone to create an RSS feed. While blog tools are common, this lets you generate a feed without a blog via either a simple web form or MSN Messenger. Although this sort of service can easily be kludged together using a basic web form and tools like the XML::RSS Perl module, it requires some programming skills to do so. FeedXS offers free personal accounts and for-fee business accounts; it’s not clear to me where not-for-profits fall into their pricing mix.
While many libraries are jumping right in to the blogosphere, some others may not want to bother with yet another web site to maintain. Or there might be short-term special purpose feeds that don’t need the overhead of a full-fledged weblog. Weekly questions for a reading group could be posted this way, or perhaps “fun facts about the library” — something that interested patrons would like to see and could add to their aggregators.