I’ve been using RSS for about a year and a half now, and it has completely changed the way I obtain information. Following the latest in library science can be accomplished in the same amount of time that I used to take just catching up on the days news at one or two sites in the morning. The downside to all of this instantaneous sharing is that I’ve found myself a little bored at conferences having already heard of and discussed many of the innovations.
Not only has it been of great use to me personally, but there isn’t a person to whom I explained RSS who wasn’t excited and interested in learning more. I’ve become something of an RSS evangelist, and now that I’m in a medical library I find that it is especially suited to the needs of the faculty here, no matter their roll. RSS can help researchers stay on top of the latest articles, it can help teachers learn about new ways of getting information to students, and it can help administrators learn about new ways to more effectively manage people.
During my job search following my degree, I subscribed to a myriad of RSS feeds for library jobs and waited for the advertisements to come to me. Even static state library pages that didn’t yet have RSS could be syndicated with tools like Page2RSS. And now there are great job search engines like SimplyHired where one can perform a search like ‘Medical Librarian” and get notified whenever new jobs including the words medical and librarian are discovered by the search engine.
RSS can be used in a number of ways by libraries some of my favorites have been:
- Notifying faculty or grad students of new research published on a topic
- Syndicating the “What’s New” section or blog on a library website
- A new books feed (which can be divided by call number)
- A new faculty publications feed
- Creating a homepage with all of the news a reference librarian would need for the reference computers
- Getting professional journal article lists on your computer instead of waiting for the journals to make their way around the office
In short, I heart RSS.
