RSS: Moving Into the Mainstream

Randy Reichardt, Cameron Science and Technology Library, University of Alberta

RSS, or Real Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary, is rapidly moving into our professional and personal lives as a way to keep track of the ever-increasing flow of new information. As a current awareness service, RSS allows for one-stop shopping. Recently, Ei started testing RSS feeds with Engineering Village 2 databases, which will allow users to plug the RSS feed from their search strategy into the reader of their choice, ending the need to rerun the search on a regular basis or deal with more e-mail in the form of alerts. With the RSS reader, users keep citations of critical interest for future reference, deleting others as required.

By now, many are using RSS feeds to keep track of weblogs, journal tables-of-contents, press releases, newspaper content, and more. In addition to following dozens of weblogs of interest, I use RSS to keep track of movie reviews from the New York Times, search engine alerts, and library-related weblogs and resources. The application of RSS feeds has moved into the library world, riding the wave of hundreds of library-related weblogs and other services. Amanda Etches-Johnston of McMaster University maintains the site, blogwithoutalibrary.net, (http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/links.html), tracking what libraries are doing with blogs, and by extension, with RSS. It makes sense that you can subscribe to Amanda's lists, by category, using an RSS feed! Gerry McKiernan of Iowa State University offers a similar service with his site, RSS(sm): Rich Site Services, "a categorized registry of library services that are delivered or provided through RSS/XML, Atom, or other types of Web feeds." (http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/RSS.htm) Library functions using RSS include announcements, cataloguing, collection development, databases, instruction, Internet resources, new books, new journal issues, news, reference services, reviews, and tables of contents.

At the University of Alberta Libraries, RSS feeds are available for library news, library instruction, and business and economic news with a Canadian emphasis. Recently, we added 285 RSS feeds for New Books by Library, and New Books by Subject. Because the University of Alberta Libraries are part of a local consortium, users can choose New Books by Library RSS feeds for up to 36 libraries in the consortium, in addition to any of the 15 University of Alberta feeds. The RSS feeds for New Books by Subject include second level LC classifications, allowing the user to subscribe to the feeds for TJ - Mechanical Engineering and Machinery and TP - Chemical Technology, for example. A subscription to the relevant RSS feeds ensures that users will not miss any new books announcements, such as when they are away at a meeting or on vacation.

RSS feeds available from the University of Alberta Libraries for T Classification

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Tired of the overflow of e-mails into your inbox? Subscriptions to all listservs and discussion groups, via e-mail, can be migrated to the right RSS reader, reducing your incoming e-mail traffic. No RSS feed is involved. Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) includes an option to "Create an e-mail subscription." As described by University of Alberta colleague Geoff Harder, (http://stlq.info/archives/001803.html), a few easy steps are all that is required to create a subscription to a listserv in Bloglines. Besides a reduction of incoming e-mails, a listserv subscription created with Bloglines allows the user to check for updates whenever convenient, and respond from within the reader itself, rather than having to create more e-mails to do so.

How to create an e-mail subscription in Bloglines

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As noted in the graphic, e-mail subscriptions are a great way to manage your mailing lists and other sites that do not provide RSS feeds.

For those not yet convinced or still puzzled about Real Simple Syndication, consider that RSS removes the burden of having to do regular, static web searching to keep current in your fields of interest. RSS allows for steady, dynamic web content streaming into one location for your perusal, freeing up time to do other things. This brings us back to Engineering Village 2.

As RSS nears availability on bibliographic search products like Engineering Village 2, the challenge for engineering librarians is to bring this new feature from the database to the users in our institutions, businesses, companies, and engineering firms. Recently, I presented sessions on library and information resources to design students in materials engineering and chemical engineering. When asked if they knew or had heard about RSS, not one student raised his or her hand in either class. In fairness to undergraduate students, this response was not unexpected - only a small handful had heard of weblogs.

Clearly we have our work cut out for us. Perhaps the groups that need targeting initially are graduate students, faculty, and engineers in industry, who have a greater need for current awareness, as well as our colleagues who have yet to embrace RSS. RSS has made the web more effective and useful by directing relevant content to the user. The introduction of RSS into Engineering Village 2 has had the same effect -the Engineering Village 2 databases now are more powerful and accessible to the users. How much longer before all major databases offer RSS as a standard feature? Stay tuned!

Need to know more about RSS?
• Peter Scott's RSS Compendium: (http://allrss.com/index.html).
• Read What is RSS and how can it serve libraries?, by Zeki Çelikba_, Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Istanbul Technical University. (http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00002531/01/RSS_and_libraries_EN3.pdf)
• The Ontario Library and Information Technology Association's RSS Toolkit: http://www.accessola.com/olita/site/showPage.cgi?page=toolkit/rss/index.html

Randy Reichardt is Information Services Librarian (Engineering), at the Cameron Science & Technology Library, University of Alberta in Edmonton. He is a member of the Engineering Division of Special Libraries Association, the Engineering Libraries Division of ASEE and Ei's Scope & Coverage Committee. He maintains the weblog, scitech library question (http://stlq.info), described as "occasional postings of interest to engineering and scitech librarians." His chapter on petroleum engineering and refining literature will appear in the forthcoming Dekker book, Using the Engineering Literature. He is the co-author with Geoff Harder of the article, "Weblogs: Their Use and Application in Science and Technology Libraries", which will appear in the journal, Science & Technology Libraries, v25 n3, later in 2005. Contact info: randy.reichardt@ualberta.ca, or 780-492-7911.