Hello World!

Welcome to the first post in my brand spanking new WordPress blog. This is probably the 6th or 7th blog I’ve started since I discovered the art of online belly button gazing in 2000. I’ve been on the interblag a long, long time.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are so useful for keeping up with your favorite websites, blogs and other online information sources. I’ve been using Bloglines to manage RSS feeds for several years, and really like it. As you can see, I track over 75 feeds.*

In lines with the assignment, I subscribed to the TOC of Academic Medicine, which publishes alot about assessing information literacy skills among medical students, one of my research interests. I organize my feeds into groups, and since this journal is work related, I filed in in my MEDLIB folder on Bloglines to look at later.

Then I added a RSS feed for a PubMed search to Bloglines. I’ve been aware of this PubMed service for awhile but hadn’t played around with it yet. The first thing to remember is that you need to log into myNCBI to use the tool. Once you do that, it’s just a matter of conducting your search (however simple or complex it is), selecting ‘RSS feed’ from the SEND TO drop down menu, and copying & pasting the unique url that you get to your RSS reader. I chose personal digital assistants for my topic.

There was a little bit of a glitch in Bloglines when I first added the feed, but I tried it again and it worked. I even created a new Bloglines folder called “PubMed Searches”, so the next time I use the PubMed RSS service I can plop it right in.

Applicability to medical libraries & our patrons

Blogs are an excellent way to keep users up to date, the trick lies in convincing them to read it. Our library has a blog, but our director won’t read it. Why? She doesn’t like to get her information that way. This is a matter of taste. Blogs are increasingly becoming accepted as a form of ’serious’ communication, especially as younger generations enter the work place. I think right now there’s still suspicion that blogs are a time waster, which is more than true for probably 95% of the dross out there.

RSS feeds save time and mouse clicks by offering all of your news sources in one location. Many academic journals and search systems have implemented this new technology as well (ISI is another company to offer RSS feeds for searches). The challenge here is the learning curve. Relatively tech-efficient users don’t have a problem managing RSS tools. (Heck, my mom even publishes family photos using a RSS feed on her Mac, so I might put forth that even the tech-helpless can do it.) Libraries should provide some type of education to those who need assistance utilizing these tools. Also my director should start reading our library’s blog. But that is just my opinion.

*This amount of information may look daunting, but keep these things in mind:

I don’t read all my feeds in one sitting, nor should you unless you want to.
Pace varies among feeds: news sites & active blogs can post up to 200 items a day, while other sites posts less than that one a month, or pictures, which don’t require much of time to glance over.

RSS Feeds are for current awareness
It’s ok to skim the headlines & only read what you want, that’s part of the time-saving benefit of using an RSS reader.

It’s ok to edit your feeds.
RSS Feeds break. Websites go inactive. Tastes & research interests change. If you no longer find a feed useful, get rid of it. No one will know.

Tags: bloglines, blogs, Pubmed, rss, rss reader