random musings from a serialist
I’m totally fascinated with the new photo pool over at Flickr called Do Your Worst. Those of you reading this via RSS probably saw my contribution to the pool come through yesterday. My favorite so far is this one:
I’m totally fascinated with the new photo pool over at Flickr called Do Your Worst. Those of you reading this via RSS probably saw my contribution to the pool come through yesterday. My favorite so far is this one:
Sorry for all of the weirdness with my RSS feed this week. I had some issues with MovableType and I’ve been tweaking my feed setup. It should be stable from now until I decide to tweak it again.
Sorry for all of the weirdness with my RSS feed this week. I had some issues with MovableType and I’ve been tweaking my feed setup. It should be stable from now until I decide to tweak it again.
BCR, the Bibliographical Center for Research, is now providing an RSS feed for The Third Indicator.
BCR, the Bibliographical Center for Research, is now providing an RSS feed for The Third Indicator. The Third Indicator is “a technical memo focusing on OCLC products and services. It includes general OCLC news as well as detailed technical information on cataloging, reference and resource sharing.”
Last year, I brainstormed an idea of having subscription-based journal RSS feeds, and as I assumed, I wasn’t the only one with this idea.
Last year, I brainstormed an idea of having subscription-based journal RSS feeds, and as I assumed, I wasn’t the only one with this idea. There was quite a bit of buzz recently when folks discovered the University of Saskatchewan Library’s eJournals with RSS feeds list. Now that they have a list of publishers and sources providing RSS feeds, it’s much more impressive to me. Granted, many of the feeds are coming from open access publishers, but the fact that there are several subscription journals with RSS feeds is indicative of where this technology may lead us in information dissemination.
Art Rhyno has created an RSS feed for his library’s new books list.
I had been attempting to puzzle out some coding to get an RSS feed automatically generated from our new books list, but time and a learning curve have prevented me from getting very far on it. I know what needs to be done, and I’m fairly certain that all I need is a little bit of Perl code. Since I have not really worked with Perl beyond tweaking the little bit I needed to tweak when setting up this blog, it would take me quite a bit of time to learn the language. In any case, it appears that Art Rhyno at the University of Windsor has already created an RSS feed for his library’s new books, and they use Endeavor Voyager, as well. I’m hoping he can help me out with a feed for my library. It would have been cool to do the programming myself, and I expect that even with Art’s help, I’ll still need to tweak it, but on the other hand, I don’t know if I’d ever get something programmed on my own.
Update:
Art responded to my comment with a link to the basic instructions on how to set this up. Cocoon? Modula-2? LISP? Maybe I need to re-think my desires to learn some programming. I suppose it will be good for me in the long run.
What if your favorite professional journals were delivered to your desktop via RSS?
Today I was commenting to my boss that I had found a resource of professional literature that was not dry or irrelevant — all of the library blogs sent daily to my RSS feed reader. That got me thinking a bit more, and it made me wonder what other uses could be made of RSS. One that had occurred to me the other week is having an RSS feed of new books as they are added to the catalog. I even found some discussion of such a tool on several blogs, as well as a resource called Project FLOW which plans to put together a toolkit of innovative add-on features for web OPACs.
Another idea that occurred to me this evening is publication through subscription RSS feeds (or even open-access models). For instance, the PLoS Biology journal recently released to the world could announce new articles or issues by making them available through an RSS feed, instead of or in addition to their current method of email announcements. Similarly, if I have an online subscription to Serials Review, I could get articles sent to me through some sort of secure RSS feed available only to subscribers. This method could come in handy for those publications that post articles online before they are published in the print editions, which mainly occurs in the sciences.
Now, I am not someone most people would consider to be an original thinker, so I figured that if this idea had occurred to me, then surely some of the more geeky types would have thought of it already. Sure enough, Wired already sports this feature on their website. Maybe some of the geeky library publications will soon follow?
