RSS

Session Information

The TOTS session on RSS Feeds will be held on Thursday August 2, 2008 from 1.00 - 3:00 in Koerner 217. This page provides a list of speakers, links to the RSS readers and feeds discussed in the session, and finally a link to a summary of the group discussion.

Speakers

• Eugene Barsky, Physiotherapy Outreach Librarian, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
• Ellen George, Librarian, Humanities and Social Sciences, Koerner Library
• Sally Taylor, Librarian, Woodward Biomedical Library

What is RSS?

RSS in Plain English (Lee LeFever. Commoncraft. April 2007)

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

RSS Readers (also known as feed readers or aggregators)

• Bloglines

• Google Reader

• NewsGator

• MyYahoo

The four readers above are the ones mentioned in the "RSS in Plain English" video. If you are interested in more RSS Readers (and there are many more), the Directory of the Best RSS Readers posting lists a number of others, along with descriptions.

RSS at UBC Library

1. New materials in UBc Library - Systems - http://newbooks.library.ubc.ca/newbooks/
2. New materials in Science received at Irving K. Barber Learning Centre (limited to Books) - SciEng - http://www.library.ubc.ca/scieng/scinews.html
3. Hand-picking web results and displaying them via an RSS feed on a subject guide webpage (Sally Taylor) - Fisheries subject guide - http://toby.library.ubc.ca/subjects/subjpage1.cfm?id=248
4. Feeding new results from a particular database search into a webpage (Eugene Barsky) - Physical Therapy Journal - http://toby.library.ubc.ca/webpage/webpage.cfm?id=665
5. Mixing RSS feeds from different journal publishers into one feed and displaying it on a weblog (Eugene Barsky) - UBC Physio Info Blog - http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/physio/health_science_news 

Useful Tools:

• Del.icio.us - hand pick sites and feed them via RSS
• RSS2JAVA - convert RSS to java for websites
• FeedBlendr - mix a number of RSS feeds into one
• AggRSSive - UBC OLT tool for RSS (can mix feeds as well)
• Feedity - easily create an RSS feed from a web page (useful if you don't have the technical know how to do this yourself but you want to alert others to updates to your site)

Overview of academic databases use of RSS:

Do-It-Yourself Alerts - article in the Library Journal, July 2007- http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6453425.html

Summary of Group Discussion

A summary of the group discussion from the TOTS RSS session, which was facilitated by eLibrary committee members, is available here: TOTS_RSS_QandAs.pdf

Further Reading

For more information about RSS and how it is being used by academic libraries, please see the following bibliography available through RefShare:

http://refworks.scholarsportal.info/refshare?site=010561141189200000/190-95-8SKCK71880713/RSS