Thing #3 - RSS

I have had a Bloglines account for over a year now, but I haven't really used it a lot. Now that I am focusing on Google's services lately, (iGoogle, Blogger, Sharing Documents, Reader), I find that I will visit those feeds much more regularly from Google Reader as I am in Google anyway. I plan to do some more comparing between Bloglines and Google Reader, but so far I think the integration factor is going to win me over to Google.

One service I definitely think we could develop to our customers in a health care environment is a seamless way for them to subscribe to feeds of their favorite journals to receive Tables of Contents. I have helped many of them subscribe for e-mail updates from many of the publishers and for some titles we've set up saved alerts on specific journal titles in some of the databases. That only works if the database is updated very frequently and soon after the publication is released (this can really vary with some databases). Both of these methods involve getting an e-mail, and we all have too many e-mails in our accounts. They are also disparate e-mails, coming mixed in with all the other stuff one gets throughout the day. My goal is to develop this service from our intranet web page and collect the RSS feeds for the top journals and make them easy to subscribe to.

The other goal I have is to be an advocate for the use of feeds in the organization. Later this week, I have been invited to participate in a visioning meeting for encouraging the use of more 2.0 services in the organization, so I hope we are getting closer to the integration of 2.0 tools in the daily work flow. There is so much talk about evidence-based practice in healthcare (as well as in other industries) and in order to stay up on the evidence, we have to make it easier for people to integrate tracking new developments in their daily work flow. Private companies have had this down for decades with the various competitive intelligence efforts they use, alert services and news tracking of competitors -- now the tools are coming for the masses to start doing some of this and it is a really exciting time to see the technologies being offered for everyone.

In this exercise, I added a couple library blogs as news feeds, the New England Journal of Medicine current issue, an NIH press release feed, several library related feeds, and a local news and events feed. These were easy to find either on a publication web site or the list of library blogs that was provided.