RSS

Okay, so many of you techie types are already aware of RSS and may already be set up to receive alerts on a variety of topics, but I do want to point out some RSS 411 that may be new to you.

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about when I say RSS, it is basically a technology that allows makers of "news" to package the news in such a way that a browser, website, email reader or other independent application on your side can go pick it up and show it to you. You can monitor many of these news "feeds" from the same program at the same time, so these programs are often call aggregators, because they aggregate all of your important news in one place for you.

Most all traditional news sources (Is Yahoo! news traditional?) now produce feeds. Feeds are also available for weather, craigslist, blogger (most any blog really) etc..., and now a growing array of library-type resources. Not only does the library have an RSS feed of library news (and my humble little blogs as well) but now O'Reilly, Web of Science, Compendex, Factiva, the Springer Book Series, and probably more, offer RSS feeds of their latest content.

Look for the lovely little orange rectangles or the more recent orange square.

Feeds can be picked up by Mozilla Thunderbird, put into your myYahoo!, placed onto your Firefox links toolbar as an "active link," converted to HTML and fed to any Web page (Including iLearn), or read in a dizzying array of ather ways.



For more information and a somewhat realtime list of our resources that support RSS, visit the RSS page on the Libraries' Web site.

Oh and do remember to copy this URL into your aggregator:

http://englibucr.blogspot.com/atom.xml