I recently revamped the subject guide for our Information Assurance (basically Info Security) masters program. One thing I did was mix together several info security news feeds into one using RSS Mix and syndicated it on the Web page using Feed2JS (which we now have installed on our own server — makes it MUCH faster). The head of the program was absolutely blown away by this. It’s just one of many ways that we can provide really innovative current awareness services to our patrons using RSS. Check out this great e-mail that David Rothman, a medical librarian in New York state, sent to Michael Stephens on how he has used RSS and aggregators to deliver targeted journal tables of contents to busy clinicians. Take a look at what he did, especially if you are a liaison librarian. This is definitely something I want to move towards in my services to the online graduate programs. Not only is it easier for the patron to get the information they want, but, for the librarian, the only work is the initial setting up of the feeds and getting the clinicians or faculty members started with an aggregator. Everyone’s happy! 🙂
For more useful info on marketing RSS, check out How to Sell RSS (Or Where the Feed Fanboys Drop the Ball) and Teaching RSS: A Discussion. Explaining RSS is much more difficult than it would seem to those of us who use it daily and these two blog posts really get to the heart of how to explain it simply and how to show why RSS is practical and useful in our daily lives.
Well, I am sure eating my words about how the big-time Library 2.0 boosters are mostly hot air and don’t provide real world assistance to librarians. Your post above and that of Michael Stephens that you link to are incredibly helpful to medical librarians struggling to alert medical providers to the incredible wealth of journals from which they could obtain information if only they could be alerted to new issues of journals they already know of and like or of the existence of journals of which they have not heard.
I agree with the points made in the How to Sell RSS (Or Where the Feed Fanboys Drop the Ball) that email is much easier to sell the merits of at this point given that RSS involves so much rigmarole and education for librarians and patrons.
Note: I read Steve Rubel’s “35 Ways You Can Use RSS Today” and thought it a superb delineation of some of the advantages of RSS and given that RSS feeds can easily be turned into email alerts, the grousing about Rubel is not at all warranted. He does an outstanding job of educating countless numbers of us about Web 2.0 and, moreover, is a very kindly man. He wrote me out of the blue (and I am a total nobody in Web 2.0 or anywhere) walking me through OPML. He is a big wheel and didn’t have any obligation to take the time to do that. Who said chivalry is dead?
I am attempting to set up a page where clinicians could sign up for email alerts of as many journals as I can find RSS feeds to turn into subscribable email alerts for:
http://www.medgrab.com/
What I can’t figure out (and any advice would be much appreciated—send mail to lemanh@proaxis.com putting Medgrab in the subject line so that I will see your note amidst the blizzard of email alerts of new postings of great blogs such as this one) is how to get the RSS feeds I have run through FeedBurner to display on Medgrab via WordPress. There is a RSS import feature in WordPress, but the FeedBurner pages aren’t files, per se, and that is all I see that WordPress accepts.
What I have learned so far is that FeedBurner and WordPress could be MUCH more user friendly and open to idiots like me who are hardworking but need to be led by the hand when creating anything that requires technical skill. That need for coddling and reassurance typifies the problems with RSS at this point. There are millions upon millions of eager dumbbells such as me in the world and that is why RSS needs to be degeeked now.
Hurray for David Rothman!
And thank you again for such a useful post!
*points at TechEssence*
Hope Leman and I spoke for a bit, and worked out a way for her to create custom feeds for Medical Current Awareness, and then offer email updates from these feeds via FeedBurner. The proof of concept is here: http://davidrothman.net/forhope.html
YAY! Nice work David! I plan to write more on this subject for the TechEssence blog when I get some spare time this week, so I’m thrilled to see your proof of concept. The greatest thing about RSS is that it can be syndicated in so many different ways (via e-mail, on a Web site in an aggregator, etc.). Something for everyone. 🙂 I am personally not a fan of the e-mail route, but if you have someone who just wants one or a few journal tables of contents sent to them, it makes good sense, rather than introducing them to another technology.
Hi, Meredith and David. David has been a huge help and has pretty well convinced me that Medgrab should have email feeds and RSS feeds. The big roadblock right now is that I don’t know how to convert’s David’s marvelous test page via WordPress and from thence onto the Medgrab site. Any advice on how to do that would be much appreciated.