Friday, March 14, 2008

My first MLA blog post - RSS Feeds!

How could we use RSS feeds at our library? Good question! Here's stuff we're doing currently:

  • Tables of contents for journals we subscribe to
  • News about library classes and events
  • Pulling in news feeds for certain subject areas
  • New books in our collection
  • Current awareness internally (esp. library tech blogs) for our staff

In the future I think we could add to this:

  • Canned PubMed or other searches for subject areas in portal/subject guide pages
  • Feeds for local resources of interest like new videos captured in our building (the IME Video Library - http://videos.med.wisc.edu)
  • Mashups of feeds using tools like Yahoo Pipes
  • Selected posts from other feeds using something like Google Reader's favorites function

Our patrons could use feeds in some similar ways and some different ways:

  • The table of contents would be the same, for example, and a no-brainer
  • Canned searches of specific interest to them would be very valuable (and not of much use on a shared library web page most likely)
  • Feeds from health sciences blogs (esp. clinical) could be useful and efficient - current awareness for them and for us would have some overlap but would largely be different (same technique, different content)
  • Feed Mashups could be mixed and matched in any number of idiosyncratic ways, so patrons could in theory get whatever they wanted

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