A New Librarian’s Blog

How do you think you could use RSS feeds at your library?

RSS feeds will be a valuable collection development tool for me. By subscribing to PubMed searches and the tables of contents of journals in my selection subject areas, I will be able to keep up to date with trends in those areas. Also, I will be able to see when new book reviews are published in the journals in my field. I will also be able to use RSS feeds to monitor the library literature that will be valuable to my work with the library’s website and the serials project I am currently working on. I currently subscribe to a number of e-mail alerting services, but I think that converting as many of these as possible to a RSS feed reader will simplify things.

How do you think patrons could use RSS feeds?

The patrons in my library who will find RSS feeds most useful will be faculty members, graduate students, and researchers. They will be able to create precise PubMed searches for articles they are interested in and have them sent to them, rather than needing to repeat the search on a regular basis. They will also be able to use RSS feeds to keep up with the articles in the journals they consult most often by subscribing to the tables of contents for those journals.