RSS Feeds College Students’ Diet for Research, an article in the 1 August 2005 USA Today highlights one way college students are taking advantage of RSS to do their research. One student at the University of Pennsylvania, “peruses summaries of the latest articles about stem cell research. She quickly dismisses the first three articles but pauses on the fourth before clicking to read the entire story.” Another student, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says, “Running searches on Google or Yahoo! will bring back so many irrelevant sources. There’s the issue of making sure the sources you do find are credible.”
Sounds like students have twigged to the significance of RSS. Is your library offering easy access to these information streams to your students and faculty? How much promotion are you doing of the RSS-ified resources you already have in your digital collections? Our library just launched a guide to using RSS for research alerts and will be including similar material in our beginning-of-year workshops for new students — but I suspect there’s a lot more we could be doing.
Student Research by RSS Hits the Mainstream
[Via TP Wire Service.]
How do you setup email using rss, using an aggregator?…
I heard it reduces spam type messages.
If you mean, how do you get RSS feeds via email, rather than through an aggregator, several services jump to mind: RMail (http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/rss2smtp.aspx) and
rss2email (http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss2email/).
If you mean, how can you read email listservs through RSS, there are several services; the one I use is Bloglines, where you can create an email address for each email list, use that address to subscribe to the mailing list, and read the mailing list posts within Bloglines.
Ken
Feeds in Higher Education
Steven includes this Thomson’s Petersons blog about how various colleges and universities are using feeds.
I highly suggest you give Gritwire a shot – http://www.gritwire.com – it’s one of the best RSS aggregators out. There is a ton of offline features being put together and are expected to launch in mid Nov. Take a look!