Developing an RSS-Based Current Awareness Service

Allan R Barclay, Rebecca Holz Ebling Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Medicine 2.0 Congress  Toronto, Canada September 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 be that 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 provides access 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 created and other select health gadgets (NLM, CDC, etc)

Gadgets! Create your own portal, and let your content mix and mingle with other people’s

Toolbars! Organize your most popular resources for a specific audience and 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_address] (me)

[email_address] (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 )