By Meredith Farkas
American Libraries Columnist
Distance learning librarian, Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont
librarysuccess@gmail.com
June/July 2008
Reading Rooms Online
Browsing current literature in the 21st century
Years ago, students and faculty spent lots of time in periodical reading rooms, looking over the recent literature in their field. Now, many libraries are phasing out their print journal collections as more and more become available online. Many of our patrons still use the journal literature, but now they can access it from their dorm rooms, offices, and homes. There is rarely a need to spend time in the periodical stacks.
Or is there? Database publishers still haven’t managed to recreate the experience of browsing journals in a reading room. The best journals in a specific subject area may be scattered across several databases, requiring time and effort to track them down. However, RSS offers us a better way to keep up. Just as RSS feeds have made it easier to keep up with other content, librarians can use RSS journal feeds as a powerful current awareness tool for their patrons.
Scientifically focused
A journal RSS feed usually provides the most recent table of contents, sometimes with abstracts for each article. Subscribing to multiple journal feeds in a discipline would enable patrons to quickly and easily keep up with the current literature. Some database vendors provide RSS feeds for each of the journals they carry, and many publishers create RSS feeds for their own journals.
Derik Badman, digital services librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia, was asked by a faculty member in science education to create a physical reading room so he and his colleagues could keep up with the literature in their area. Derik instead suggested creating a virtual reading room using RSS feeds of the key journals in that discipline.
Using Yahoo Pipes (pipes.yahoo.com), Badman created a combined RSS feed of the key journals in science education and then set up an e-mail subscription to the feed for the faculty member. Every time the RSS feed updates, new content will be sent to the faculty member’s e-mail. He has done the same for himself to keep up with library literature. A feed like this could also be displayed on a web page. Librarians could use tools such as Grazr (grazr.com) to display each journal separately in an easy-to-browse web interface.
In addition to gathering RSS feeds in a single space, they can also be filtered to only display content that includes specific keywords. Using Feed Digest (feeddigest.com), you can combine multiple feeds, and filter and display them. This way, you can ensure that the information coming to patrons is closely targeted to their interests.
The reading-rooms concept could work in any field where current awareness is critical. At the Community General Hospital Medical Library in Syracuse, New York, Information Service Specialist David Rothman uses journal RSS feeds to provide a current awareness service for busy clinicians who don’t have time to come to the library.
What the doctors ordered
For some physicians, Rothman created an account in Google Reader, a tool that allows people to subscribe to and read multiple feeds on a single page. In the account, he subscribes to journals relevant to the physician’s specialty. He then gives the account information to the physicians and instructs them on how to subscribe to additional journals.
The best thing about RSS is that most people don’t realize how easy it is to set up something like this as long as the feeds exist. By providing an easy way for patrons to keep up with the literature important to their current awareness, we provide an important service while also increasing the likelihood that people will use our journals. For a profession concerned with remaining relevant, this is a great way to demonstrate how valuable we are.