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Developing an RSS-BasedCurrent Awareness Service
Allan R Barclay, Rebecca HolzEbling Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Medicine 2.0 Congress Toronto, CanadaSeptember 5, 2008
Current Awareness in the Stone Age
Current Awareness in the Information Age
Current Awareness in the Not Too Distant Future?
(the Post Information Age?)
Well, it doesn’t have to bethat bad…
The Problem with “The Literature”
Its slow and you’re busy (7 minutes a week?)
Its only what gets published or vetted
Its not inherently interactive or engaging
Its only a small part of what goes on in a field
Its what controls tenure, hence controls faculty
Its largely controlled by content publishers, not content creators
Oh yeah, now there’s audio, video, notebooks, etc
A Brief Historical Digression…
The current publishing and distribution model is a historical aberration from the Industrial Age
The facilitators are often now the bottlenecks
Their business model and your awareness model are largely incompatible (scarcity vs. plenty)
Passive consumption of your own creative works is perverse (and copyright law keeps getting worse)
Performance is the new eminence - reputations need to be retooled regularly & anyone can be a star
Read Glut, Small Pieces Loosely Joined for more
What We Did (and why)
We started with our existing Online Journals list
What We Did (and why)
We divided the feeds by subject/discipline
What We Did (and why)
We created OPML bundles and working links for “top” journals in a
field/discipline
What We Did (and why)
And for all journals we had full text access to in a field/discipline
What We Did (and why)
The really sexy part – custom processing of the feeds to add formatting and social tools using
SimplePie
Why OPML Bundles?
Use them wherever you prefer – Google Reader, Bloglines, Thunderbird, etc.
No product or site lock-in here!
But Wait, There’s More!
While we’re at it why not add news feeds?
But Wait, There’s More!
And perhaps some podcasts while we’re here?
But Wait, There’s More!
And even some self-study tools for the independent learner!
What about non-text content?
The UW School of Medicine & Public Health providesaccess to many videos for free
What about non-text content?
You can subscribe to those too!
Where We’re Going Next
Custom bundles, maybe a shopping cart
Smart feeds using Yahoo Pipes
Feeds are fine but gadgets make us giddy
Toolbars are a great community tool
Scripts can add functionality even to other people’s sites
Mobile makes sense for many types of content and communication tools
Creation of group tools, individual tools and hybrids
Avoiding the “Epic 2014 trap”
Gadgets!
We provide a selection of gadgets we’ve createdand other select health gadgets (NLM, CDC, etc)
Gadgets!
Create your own portal, and let your contentmix and mingle with other people’s
Toolbars!
Organize your most popular resources for a specific audienceand pull together disparate things in one tidy package
EBM Toolbar
General Library Toolbar
A Modest Proposal…
Lets start building tools to stay on top of this stuff, and make them freely available
Let’s work on redefining what it means to be “on top of” or “ready for” a field (libraries used to think they could have “all the important stuff” – it’s a bottomless pit)
Small nimble tools and über-portals of death can complement each other nicely
Open source is nice but standards and access are the key (APIs, metadata, standards-based development). Amazon makes money, eh?
How Can You Help?
Make feeds available whenever possible
Ask vendors and developers for open APIs
If you know people who’d like to collaborate on tool development or data storage let us know
Remember your friendly neighborhood librarian or geek – we like money but live to solve problems
That’s all - thanks!
[email protected] (me)
[email protected] (my partner in crime)
http://ebling.library.wisc.edu/rss/ (feeds page)
http://projects.hsl.wisc.edu/rss/ (feeds project)
http://ebling.library.wisc.edu/toolbars-extensions.cfm (toolbars, gadgets, plugins)
Images courtesy of:
PBS (Clockwork Orange - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/theater/clockworkorange_big.html)Public Health Image Library (Osborne computer #6442 - http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/details.asp)Garner’s Classics (2001 monolith - http://www.garnersclassics.com/pics/2001/monolith.jpg)