Open Scholarship with RSS

Jeremy Keith wrote some time ago about “Streaming my life away — where he talks about the possibility of integrating RSS streams from all the various tools he uses. He calls this new mix a “life stream” and provides an overview of what he does with his time. It integrates feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, and the various blogs to which he posts. The aggregate of his online activity is impressive when rendered in chronological format, as it is.
Steve, one of five bloggers who writes “Circulatable: A Librarian’s Group,” wrote about Jeremy’s application in a post titled “PaperRSS Trails” and wondered about the possible application of this technology to library life. Steve noted that he and a librarian colleague wrote an article using Writeboard, which offers an RSS feed to help you keep track of other’s activities in the collaboration space. He suggested combining this information with a feed from Refworks, and wondered what sort of profile would result from aggregating feeds used by someone in their research activities.
I have thought a great deal about the ways librarians might use RSS to push relevant information to researchers. I had not considered the flip side of that proposition: that the aggregate of a researcher’s RSS feeds might serve as a powerful profile of that researcher’s interests. If librarians could keep track of a researcher’s interests by reviewing, in real time, that person’s RSS feeds, the library could offer better — more precise and timely — reference services.
Having access to a scholar’s feeds — even if only the research oriented ones — also opens some interesting questions of academic freedom and privacy. Having come from a corporate background, where the presumption of individual privacy on the office network was nil, I have found the academic concept of privacy refreshing. (To be honest, I’ve also found it a bit frustrating at times as it limits the scope of data mining within the academic environment by shielding users — myself included, of course — in a level of anonymity that makes it more difficult to provide individually tailored alert services, RSS or otherwise.)
I also wonder how this concept of privacy will change in academic settings as services like Del.icio.us, flickr, and the rest become more common. What degree of privacy will people give up over the long term to take part in these virtual communities? What will it look like when that fuzzy space at the intersection of individual privacy and group interaction becomes clear?

Build Your Own Aggregator with FeedZcollector

I’ve been playing around a bit over the past week with an application called FeedZcollector, written by brothers Xander and Fred Zelders. FeedZcollector is a Windows application that monitors RSS feeds, adding new items to either a Microsoft Access or MySQL database. FeedZcollector is the retrieval engine behind Feeds4all.com.
I’ve been using the trial version to pull feeds into Access (this free version limits you to 10 feeds; you can purchase versions of the tool that let you work with 25, 100, 1000, or an unlimited number of feeds).
The tool simply pulls down the latest items from the feeds you enter and stores them (title, abstract, URL, time loaded, etc.) in an Access (or MySQL) database. What you do with them from that point forward is up to you. The Zelders purposefully designed the tool to be a component of something larger — but a component that could be used together with other applications.
In my testing, FeedZcollector did its job well, pulling feeds into Access soon after the source site updated the feed. Being able to construct fielded searches, or to augment entries with other data generated by my hypothetical site’s users (tags, times viewed, etc. — anything that could be recorded in a data structure) makes it a powerful back-end tool for repurposing content.
As a die-hard Mac/Unix guy, I wish there were a version of the software that would run in a Unix/Linux environment. However, according to Fred Zelders,

We (Xander and me) are sorry but we have no plans to make versions for Mac OS X or Unix. The reason is the lack of Mac OS X and/or Unix development skills.
There is a possibility however to run FeedZcollector on a Mac (OS X) by installing and running FeedZcollector under Parallels. (I’m running FeedZcollector myself at this very moment on my iMac 20″)

FeedZcollector is a useful foundation for building your own aggregator without having to rely on external, Internet-based, services such as RSSMix or Sphere that provide aggregation services with or without keyword filtering.

Nature’s Open Peer Review Experiment Closed

Nature launched a bold experiment in June 2006 in which scholars could (voluntarily) post their articles for open peer review via a Wiki-like interface. After receiving a number of article submissions that surprised Nature’s editorial staff, the staff were perhaps equally surprised when comments from the broader scholarly community were not forthcoming:

Despite the significant interest in the trial, only a small proportion of authors opted to participate. There was a significant level of expressed interest in open peer review among those authors who opted to post their manuscripts openly and who responded after the event, in contrast to the views of the editors. A small majority of those authors who did participate received comments, but typically very few, despite significant web traffic. Most comments were not technically substantive. Feedback suggests that there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments.
Nature and its publishers will continue to explore participative uses of the web. But for now at least, we will not implement open peer review.

The full report, “Overview: Nature’s peer review trial,” is on Nature’s web site.
I find it interesting (though not entirely surprising) that while many members of the scholarly community were open to receiving feedback from peers in a public forum, they were simultaneously less willing to provide it.
I’m likewise curious to see if an experiment like this aimed more directly at rising scholars — those in the midst of, or having recently completed, their doctorates — might have different results. Or is the tradition of anonymous peer review is so deeply embedded in academia that it trumps these newfangled “web 2.0” tools?

More on Serendipity

I wrote about serendipity and its seeming decline back in the spring. I recently came across a clever catalog tool from the Allen County Public Library (Fort Wayne, Indiana) that enables a moment of pleasant surprise.
Ian, on the acpl.info blog, describes what the tool recreates for the patron:

…[W]hat happened when you went to look for something at the library was that you saw an intriguing title on your way to what you were looking for, and then you let yourself get a little bit sidetracked, and you looked over some other books nearby, and then you thought of something else you heard about or thought about or read about or saw on television or just realized you were interested in, and you went off to look that up, and maybe you passed the New Book display on the way and found something by your favorite author that you didn’t even know was out yet.

The new tool, a “bookwall,” shows the image of a book cover for each book cataloged at the ACPL the day before. Clicking on a cover image brings up a library card with brief reviews of the book — and, most important, a link to the book’s entry in the ACPL catalog. The order of the books is not obvious, which makes it random. A toddler’s picture book might be next to an adult biography and above a manga.
I’d love to see this pushed out to patrons as an RSS feed. And to implement this for my library, too!

[Via Tame the Web.]

Introducing WOMBLINK — Word Of Mouth Blog LINK

UPDATE (9 March 2012): I’ve disabled this tool as it ended up being a honeypot for spammers.
The discussion in the comments section of my most recent post prompted me to do a bit of coding. It struck me that libraries needed a tool to help encourage their patrons to blog about the library. And not just to encourage talk — to actively invite comment on particular web pages (describing events, book talks, policy changes, etc.) Weblogs may well be the most powerful world of mouth tool in a library’s Internet arsenal.
The result is a simple tool I’ve called Word of Mouth Blog LINK — WOMBLINK for short.
The concept is straightforward. A WOMBLINK is a link provided by a library web site directly back to a specific web page. It is designed to be included in weblogs and is meant to be drop-dead easy for the librarian and patron to use, requiring nothing more than copying and pasting for the site publisher or the blogger.
So what is it? A WOMBLINK is two lines of HTML that, when included on a web page, display the words “Blog This”. A prospective blogger can click on this link and receive a second short snippet of HTML that includes a link directly to the original web page as well as a small logo provided by the site owner.
So what does it look like? Well, if I wanted to make it easy for people to blog about this article on RSS4Lib, I would go to WOMBLINK and fill in a form. This would generate the following HTML:
<a href = ‘http://www.rss4lib.com/womblink/display.pl?id=103’>Blog This</a><br>
WOMBLINK provided by <a href = ‘http://www.rss4lib.com/womblink/’>RSS4Lib</a>
That code looks like this in the browser:
Blog This
WOMBLINK provided by RSS4Lib
Then, as a blogger wanting to comment on and link directly to this web page, I would click the “Blog This” WOMBLINK above and get the following bit of HTML code:
<a href = ‘http://www.rss4lib.com/’><img src =
‘http://www.rss4lib.com/images/RSS4Lib-Logo.jpg’ height = ’20’
border = ‘0’ alt = ‘Link to RSS4Lib’><a> <a href =
‘http://www.rss4lib.com/’>RSS4Lib</a><br><font
size = ‘1’>This link courtesy <a href =
‘http://www.rss4lib.com/womblink/’>RSS4Lib WOMBLINK</a></font>
Once copied and pasted into a blog, it looks like this — complete with a logo for the web site being blogged:
Link to RSS4Lib RSS4Lib
This link courtesy RSS4Lib WOMBLINK
While some blogging software packages offer a JavaScript bookmarklet to “blog this,” bookmarklets aren’t always that useful. The blogger may not be technically savvy enough to install it or may not be working at her own computer when she sees your web site. It makes more sense to use a software-independent tool that all bloggers can take advantage of. An added plus of WOMBLINK is that the source web site can provide its own graphic (as long as it works well 25 pixels tall!) to help reinforce that web site’s identity.
Let me know what you think of this tool — send your comments and feedback to me at womblink@rss4lib.com.

Making Viral Advertising Easy

Jill Stover of Library Marketing – Thinking Outside the Book (a great source of library marketing ideas, by the way), wrote about a handy feature added to the Engineering Village 2 database. Once you’re in the database and viewing the abstract of an article, there’s a link to “blog this”. That link, when clicked, gives you a snippet of code to put into your weblog.
The code EV2 provides gives the title of the article and a graphic for EV2. Clicking on either will bring you through your library’s proxy server to the full text. (This example will work if you have access to Tufts University’s proxy server, but not for anyone else…):

Corrosion and fatigue characteristics of positively polarised Zeron 100 base and weld metal in synthetic seawater

Jill notes how useful this functionality is for librarians who want to highlight tools available to their patrons. I take this one step further: why not have a link to “blog this” appear on any relevant portion of the library site? From a change in hours to a new exhibit in the library lobby to other news, events, or information of note — make it easy for your patrons to link to the source of the information when they are blogging.

[Via Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book.]

ScienceDirect’s Top25

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

The TOP25 provides lists of the most popular articles from over 2,000 scientific, technical and medical journals available on ScienceDirect. Updated quarterly, it’s a great tool to help take the stress out of research and quickly identify the key developments in your area.
These most popular lists are published on the TOP25 website but you can also register and set-up free email alerts – a great way for busy researchers to efficiently pin-point those “must-read” articles.
Elsevier’s ScienceDirect is used by about 10 million people, which means you can be sure that the TOP25 is an authoritative, one-stop method of finding out what your peers and colleagues are reading.

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):

[We’re] currently looking to develop RSS for the TOP25 service. This should be implemented by early 2007 (April). When it is available we will alert all TOP25 users to its existence with a Customer Service notification.
…. We will also be implementing RSS feed capability for our other ScienceDirect alerts – the Volume/Issue, Search, Citation and Topic alerts very soon.

So stay tuned…

Geotagging, RSS, and Photography

An article in today’s New York Times, “Pictures, With Map and Pushpin Included,” (registration required), talks about the increasing use of “geotagging” (see my June 17, 2005, post, “Geotagging“) in home photography. What is interesting is that Sony now has a small GPS unit designed to integrate with your camera’s EXIF data — so once you’ve taken your pictures and gone home, you can download both the pictures and your GPS data into your computer and merge them.
Flickr, of course, lets you manually add GPS data, and there are rumors — with some evidence to back them up — that Apple’s iPhoto has some currently-inactive code to integrate GPS data in iPhoto with Google Maps.
So what I’d like someone to do is this. Build a search tool that lets you look for pictures of the same place you took a memorable or significant picture. Then, sign up for an RSS feed for that location — that will deliver other people’s photos to you as they are taken. Curious to see a particular park where you used to play? Want to see the view inside a ballpark on different days? In a sense, this would be a webcam with highly irregular postings. This would also a way to link you — to build a community of a different kind — to other people who just might have more in common than having been in the same place at a different time.