Last week I gave a presentation at the Inforum 2008 Conference, held at the University of Economics, Prague, with the title: RSS and current awareness: How two projects (ticTOCs and Gold Dust) are hoping to improve the academic information landscape.
An abstract of the paper is available, and slides are available from Slideshare.
The presentation looked at the growing importance of RSS as a means of delivering current content information within academia.
Although normally associated with general news and blogs, RSS feeds are now available for thousands of journal tables of contents (TOCs), and also for calls for papers, funding opportunities, new patents, new theses and dissertations, news from professional society news, forthcoming conferences and so on. I’ve mentioned examples of some of these sources previously in this blog.
Two JISC funded projects looking at RSS, both with technical input from Heriot Watt University, are currently underway in the UK. They are: ticTOCs, which is developing a freely available journal current awareness service; and Gold Dust, which is producing a prototype for the delivery of highly relevant, personalised current awareness content of a variety of kinds to academics. The second part of the presentation was an update on these two projects.
The pictures above show the main conference auditorium, and the conference reception, held in the Klementium. As well as trends and updates in electronic information resources, other conference topics included information literacy, finding Web 2.0 materials for presentations, and the latest developments in search.
Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian
3 August 2008 at 6:05 pm |
Thanks !