Integrating Blogs and Subject Guides

The Edmonton Public Library‘s subject guides are an excellent example of how RSS feeds can be integrated into library subject guide pages. See, for example, the guides to Architecture and Books Similar to the Da Vinci Code.
Both of these subject guides offer a variety of static links to other web and library resources. They also have a section of “Blog Entries” — comments and suggestions by EPL staff to other resources. According to Peter Schoenberg, the EPL’s Virtual Services Librarian,

Our distributed subject page authors/editors, can add a feed to their page by typing the url of the feed into a web form on their edit page. They can add a blog entry in the same way (typing text in a box). The format, title and page placement are all controlled by our web edit pages.
Not sure how many blog entries we will be seeing, but we are hoping it will allow a more personal and less institutional feel to the subject pages.
We use our home built cold fusion pages to provide the content management / web edit pages for our authors.

EPL naturally offers RSS Feeds for their subject guides along with book reviews by patrons (in fiction, non-fiction, kids, and teens).
[Via [Web4Lib.]

RSS to Augment Subject Guides

More good stuff from Web4Lib: Several libraries have included RSS feeds from relevant sources in their subject guide pages. This makes bringing the latest information (whether that is articles, news, products, databases, etc.) to your patrons with minimal web page editing. Assuming, of course, that you have a source for good information that you can draw from, such as a trusted weblog or a database provider’s ‘latest articles’ feed. Several examples of this sort of tool:

Somewhat related, I’m working on a project that will eventually include RSS feeds for resources added to our subject guides.

Bibliography of Blogs in the Library World

Amanda Etches-Johnson at BlogWithoutaLibrary.net maintains a bibliography of RSS-related articles and books. Check out her exhaustive collection of articles about blogging & RSS in the library world. If you’re looking for thought-starters — or literature to support your desire to use blogs and RSS — this is a great place to start.
She updates her furl archive more frequently than the blog page.

RSS Creator

Dave Walker at the Cal State San Marcos library announced a preview version of his RSS Creator (version 0.1). A Flash demo of the software is available. Tools like this really open the doors to bring the benefits of RSS to our patrons — without necessarily needing to educate our patrons on what RSS is or how it’s used. Walker writes in Web4Lib:

The system leverages Ex Libris’ SFX and Metalib systems (using Metalib’s
XML-based API) to create the feeds, but the idea behind it is not specific to SFX or Metalib, and could be done with other technology. Here are some of the benefits:
(1) Gives a library instant access to 20,000 to 40,000 or more feeds [by creating] an RSS feed for any journal or newspaper indexed by one of our databases, so long as that database is searchable via
Metalib….
(2) Requires virtually no discovery, collection, or maintenance. All of the information about the journals is already available (and updated) in the SFX knowledge base. A library simply downloads this information out of SFX, uploads it into RSS Creator….
(3) All links point back to SFX
[…]
It is, in other words, a large, free RSS-based table of contents system. I just need to find some time in between more pressing matters to finish it up. But I’m hoping to roll it out to our faculty here this fall.
[Via the Web4Lib listserv. Original posting.

Student Research by RSS Hits the Mainstream

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.

[Via TP Wire Service.]

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.]