Tuesday, September 11, 2007

RSS feeds continued







Set up an RSS feed in Bloglines
It took some tweaking, a little thinking outside the box, and an element of dogged determination, but in the end persistence won out. I am finding that, rather than providing a step by step procedure, on occassion, the 23 things instuctions merely point in the general direction. It therefore requires little leaps of imagination, intuition, or, in a few unexpected instances, commonsense to figure out where I am supposed to go next. However, there is now a database search RSS feed silently growing in my Bloglines Newsfeeder along with all the other feeds which are inexorably increasing in number.

What I have learned
In the interests of time, choose the full text option for a database search before selecting it as an RSS feed.

Questions

How useful is an RSS feed for a database search?
For researchers: excellent.
For Lecturers: good.
For students: fair, depending on how early they begin their assignment research.
RSS feeds on the whole: they have great potential.
Where can I see RSS feeds being used?
RSS feeds are useful for anyone who has an area of interest where they want to be kept informed of the latest developments or research.
Do I think this technology would engage students?
If marketed correctly it would. I think the library should sell the concept to students. One way of doing this is by including the technology in our Information Literacy classes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well done, getting past the RSS is the first big hurdle in this Web 2 stuff. This leaving comments on blogs is OK, as an exercise, but a wiki would be a more open way to discuss issues...so that's next week!!