RSS Feeds

Question: How do you think you could use RSS feeds at your library? How do you think patrons could use RSS feeds? Write a brief response on your blog.

The problem of staying aware of new journal content is pretty overwhelming. I manage a very small library and have provided routing of journals for the years I have been there. I personally prefer seeing a hard copy -- but am guilty of allowing it to languish unread on my desk (or in one of the many stacks lying around, well organized of course, but messy). Thus the disadvantage of routing -- only the first person on the routing list gets a time-value product.

Now that more electronic tables of contents are available I am hoping I can use them to discontinue the routing but still enable people to see at least the titles easily.

The problem has been that there is no single service that serves as a central place to manage all the tables of contents links whether you want to get them by email or some other way. Although I use a journal vendor and purchase several online products they do not have a table of contents management service that meets all my needs. Furthermore, hospital staff do leave their jobs occasionally and I imagine if they have set up an online management system for the journals they read they would still be interested in those titles -- even if they can no longer get to full text via my library.

So, the RSS feed system seems like a real possibility. If a customer is willing to use such a system it will take the notices out of their email in box and give them one central spot to purposely go to and peruse new information. It has a search box for their selected materials, too.

This service will take a lot of work initially to set up whether by the user or by me. I will also need to provide some links on my webpage to these neat YouTube videos for instruction. However, I do think the use of an RSS reader service has potential to solve my journal routing problem.