RSS

RSS seems like a great solution for alerts and current awareness, but ECU has not yet got a really simple way to display RSS feeds.

I did finally manage to set up an alert and placed the feed in Bloglines. See the image here under feeds. There are several feeds I've set up, mainly book reviews but also a feed called Ebsco ERIC Action research alert. Now whenever more citation come into Ebsco ERIC with these search terms they will be added to the feed.

I had to first set up a Bloglines account to do this. This seems a bit annoying to have all these different accounts for different things.

You need to be signed into EBSCOhost and create an alert. You then receive a this confirmation from EBSCOhost

To:
Subject: EBSCOhost Alert Notification

An Alert was created by Joe BLOGGS on 03/25/2007 04:29:39 AM.

Alert Run Date: 03/25/2007 04:29:39 AM
Alert Name: jbloggs
Database: ERIC
Run Alert For: One Year
Search Strategy: (((SU "Higher Education" and action research)) AND (PT "Journal Articles")) and Publication Type: Journal Articles
Frequency: Monthly
RSS Feed:
http://rss.epnet.com/AlertSyndicationService/Syndication.asmx/GetFeed?guid=1021038

You paste the RSS Feed in your Bloglines using Add feed. ,

What did I learn? I had a chance to explore RSS using the Bloglines feeder and finally got it to work, something I have been struggling with for ages! Great! Now I can pass this info on to academic staff who have been asking about this. Shame it's not "really simple"...yet.

Some of the others have been setting up RSS feeds in My Google. This is something I will now explore too.