13th Conference on Professional Information Resources

Autor: Roddy MacLeod, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom

Fulltext

Abstract:

RSS is a protocol with immense potential, and is increasingly enabling the delivery of current content direct to the desktop. A growing number of content providers are now producing RSS feeds for an increasing variety of resource types of interest to academics, e.g. journal tables of contents (TOCs), calls for papers, funding opportunities, patents, theses and dissertations, press releases, professional society news, forthcoming conferences and news from projects and digital repositories. Issues such as awareness of the technology, the difficulty of identifying feeds of interest, filtering, personalisation and reusing feed content, and standardisation of feed formats need to be overcome before the potential of RSS can be fully realised. Two large-scale consortium projects based around RSS and with implications for the international information community are currently underway in the UK. They are: ticTOCs, which is developing a freely available journal current awareness service; and Gold Dust, which is producing a prototype for the delivery of highly relevant, personalised current awareness content of a variety of kinds to academics. This presentation will look at the current situation with respect to RSS within academia, and explain how the two projects aim to improve the information landscape.

About author:

Roddy MacLeod, MA, DipLib, MCILIP is Senior Subject Librarian at Heriot-Watt University. He edits the Internet Resources Newsletter, manages the TechXtra service (a free service for technology information) and is a past manager of the Pilot Engineering Repository (PerX) project. He provides management support for the ticTOCs project, and subject advice for the Gold Dust project. He was the Information World Review Information Professional of the Year in 2000, and has led initiatives which have won three marketing and publicity awards. He co-edited the 4th edition of ‘Information sources in engineering’, published by KG Saur, which was chosen by the Engineering Libraries Division of the ASEE as 2006 Best Reference Work. He has written and presented on topics such as engineering information resources, RSS, and branding. Home page: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html

Author: representative OVID, OVID - Wolters Kluwer Health, Germany

Author: Krassimira Anguelova, CABI, Bulgaria

Author: Pavel Kocourek, INCAD, Czech Republic

Author: Annika Lindemann, Oxford University Press, United Kingdom

Co-authors:

Matthew Howells

Author: Sylwia Kolankowska, The IET, United Kingdom

Author: Paul Fertl, Gale - Cengage Learning, Germany

Author: Piotr Golkiewicz, Elsevier B.V., Netherlands