I looked at the DRIVER portal, and while it does not appear to have a
RSS feed, it does have a MyDRIVER service allowing you to save your
searches and have them run periodically in the background. There is a
fairly substantial but not complete set of repositories registered
for cross-searching. How well "subject searches" work (and
especially subject searches for new items only) is another matter;
my experience with ALL such offerings from any provider is that they
are useless for several reasons, not least because interests change
subtly, and it's very difficult to specify the search well. But then,
I'm not a librarian with years of training in searching...
--
Chris Rusbridge
Director, Digital Curation Centre
Email: [log in to unmask] Phone 0131 6513823
University of Edinburgh
Appleton Tower, Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9LE
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
On 13 Mar 2009, at 12:58, MacLeod, Roderick A wrote:
> Thanks for that response, Ian. The core concepts may be in place,
> yes,
> but the fact remains that after $millions of expenditure on
> repositories, I (or rather the researchers I serve) can't, without
> considerable effort and some know-how, easily scan new items appearing
> in multi-repositories, or easily save a search for new items in
> repositories of their choice and scan futureresults.
>
> Which is shurley a mishtake. Something vaguely similar to TweetDeck,
> but containing new repository materials, would surely do more for the
> repository cause than...well...an awful lot of other things.
>
> Roddy
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Ian Stuart [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>> Sent: 13 March 2009 11:51
>> To: MacLeod, Roderick A
>> Subject: Re: [JISC-REPOSITORIES] Something different: Twitter
>> search on repsitories
>>
>> MacLeod, Roderick A wrote:
>>> Thanks. I think I was being a bit facetious rather than anything.
>>> And to continue - what is the URL of the service 'a la
>> Tweetdeck' that
>>> will allow me to easily choose, say, IRs that are
>> particularly good in
>>> social science subjects from a list of all IRs, where I can also
>>> search across all IRs for, say, items on African politics and have
>>> that search saved with no more effort, and have the new results of
>>> that search delivered in real time, and also be able to
>> scan in real
>>> time new items appearing in my selected IRs? And have this
>> happen when
>>> I click on an icon on my desktop. i.e to treat new items
>> in IRs like tweets in Tweetdeck.
>>
>> There are, I think, two aspects to this:
>> 1) Searching Subject Repositories (ala arXive/PubMedCentral)
>> for items that match a particular query
>> 2) Searching Institutional Repositories for items that match
>> a query, which includes a subject classification.
>>
>> I'm not aware of a list of Subject repositories... as a
>> parallel to OpenDOAR for IRs, so any cross-searcher in mode
>> (1) would need to be hand-coded.
>>
>> Subject-based searching in mode (2) seems to be fraught with
>> difficulties - not least of which is the one that many IRs
>> don't actually have a subject classification!
>>
>> ... but the rest of it is just a case of search scripts and output
>> formats: you ping (well, your interface does it for you) the
>> repository with a defined API ( such as
>> "my_query?subject=African+politics" ) and you get an Atom/RSS
>> feed back...
>> (which is, if you think about it, basically what twitter et
>> all do: they have a profile of the people you follow, and you
>> ping for a list of new tweets based on that list)
>>
>> ... it needs more thought to flesh it out, and there are
>> bound to be a whole pile of issues that need to be sorted -
>> but the core concepts are already in place: EPrints.org has
>> feeds for "latest deposits"
>>
>> --
>>
>> Ian Stuart.
>> Bibliographics and Multimedia Service Delivery team, EDINA,
>> The University of Edinburgh.
>>
>> http://edina.ac.uk/
>>
>> This email was sent via the University of Edinburgh.
>> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered
>> in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>>
>
>
> --
> Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity
> registered under charity number SC000278.
>
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