Roddy, LibWorm is an interesting example, providing RSS on search,
i.e. alerts, on aggregated RSS feeds. I notice this approach is also
used in NARCIS, the Dutch portal that incorporates DARE. On launch it
was claimed the portal has an RSS feed, but I couldn't see it, and it
turns out that it offers RSS on search. (DRIVER also promotes
alerting for its portal, but when I asked them they said it isn't
there at all yet.)
What do you think of this approach, RSS on search? It should be
effective for some users. I hope these providers will also make the
aggregated feeds available to other services, sort of on an OAI
principle as it were, but I'm not sure I see this happening. At the
repository level, EPrints, in contrast, offers RSS repository feeds
as well as RSS on search.
My experience with Google Alerts, which is based on its harvesting
and indexing rather than RSS, is that I've never been alerted to
anything in a repository that I might be interested in. I'm not sure
why that is. Google Reader is a different matter, however, because I
have been alerted to relevant repository content, directly and
indirectly, but then only because I have subscribed to specific feeds.
So, useful discovery routes are emerging for current contents in
repositories, but it's still harder than it should be to learn about
new content (yes, there is some).
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
At 10:56 27/06/2008, MacLeod, Roderick A wrote:
>Sadly, I didn't get any comments about the suggestion below from this
>volatile list, not even a damp squid. I'd have thought that good ways
>for the content in IRs to surface (Scirus, Scholar, DRIVER Search Portal
>http://search1.driver.research-infrastructures.eu/ IRS, the Aussie
>http://search.arrow.edu.au/ and, for example, a decent current awareness
>setup) would help convince people of the benefits of deposit.
>
>On 25th I wrote:
>
>...how about also an equivalent, for collected IRs, and utilising their
>RSS feeds, of
>LibWorm: http://www.libworm.com/
>One could imagine the usefulness of such things as:
>Search new items in IRs
>Feeds for new items in IRs by subject, or by type of item
>Feeds for IRs by, for example, geographic region/country
>Tagcloud of new items in IRs
>Export of citations to RefWorks/EndNote/etc
>
> > Go on - chuck in a comment and watch the fireworks from a
> > safe distance :)
>
>
>--
>Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity
>registered under charity number SC000278.
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