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Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but whilst that would be a good outcome, I don't think it's as easy as that. In the case of Twitter, the infrastructure of feeds and search feed facility is already in place. TweetDeck plugs in to that source. In the case of IRs, their RSS feeds are nowhere collected as far as I know, and as we found with Gold Dust, can be a scunner to find. We also went through some of this sort of thing with ticTOCs RSS feeds for journal TOCs from hundreds of publishers, and manually collected 12,000 feeds (in ticTOCs' case, there were multiple feeds from most publishers). However, ticTOCs will shortly plug into CrossRef where publishers will be requested to register their journal TOC RSS feeds, and in the future the process will be automated as far as ticTOCs is concerned. Wouldn't ROAR be the logical place for IR managers to register their RSS feeds, and then the 'RepositoryDeck' could work with ROAR? Roddy > -----Original Message----- > From: Repositories discussion list > [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Chris Rusbridge > Sent: 19 March 2009 16:46 > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: $millions of expenditure on repositories and you > still can't easily scan new items > > So guys, JISC tells us they will shortly announce a rapid > innovation call. Tweetdeck is a one-person hack built on > Adobe Air and quite portable (useful despite being not the > greatest UI, IMHO). Anyone willing to have a go at something > Tweetdeck-like for IRs for Roddy? > > One noteworthy difference is that IRs change much slower than > Tweetdeck. It is perhaps questionable to leave an application > open so it could run a search for you every few minutes > against services updated < once per day. > > -- > 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 19 Mar 2009, at 15:52, MacLeod, Roderick A wrote: > > > Yes, interests change subtly. Current awareness that built on this > > very notion of changing interests was part of the Gold Dust project > > http://www.hull.ac.uk/golddust/ . Gold Dust investigated > ways to find > > relevant new content which would evolve with the evolution of > > researchers' interests, including content from about 100 IRs taken > > from IR RSS feeds, without the need for the researchers in > question to > > have to specify search terms. Gold Dust's results were > quite good WRT > > IR content, because the metadata in question was similar to the > > metadata used to create the Gold Dust Personal Interest Profiles. > > Gold Dust's matching results for some other categories of > feeds, eg. > > component announcements, were poor, because the metadata > contents were > > quite different. > > > > To get back to the original rant - Saved searches are better than > > nothing. RSS feeds for new content are a must. Saved > searches by RSS > > are useful. But none of those things compare with the ease of use, > > WRT current awareness scanning, of something vaguely resembling > > TweetDeck for IRs. > > > > Roddy MacLeod > > > >> -----Original Message----- > >> From: Repositories discussion list > >> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Chris > >> Rusbridge > >> Sent: 19 March 2009 15:31 > >> To: [log in to unmask] > >> Subject: Re: $millions of expenditure on repositories and > you still > >> can't easily scan new items > >> > >> 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. > >>> > >> > > > > > > -- > > Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity registered > under charity > > number SC000278. > > > -- Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity registered under charity number SC000278.