RSS Feeds: Fast and Customized Alerts

Keeping Up to Date

Current Awareness Services - the old way, email alerts
Gordon Library RSS Feeds

What is it?

rss RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a convenient way to keep up with new information, whether it is content of a web site, news service, table of contents of your favorite journals, and podcasts of audio content and vodcasts/vidcasts with video.

RSS has been adopted by many information providers (Boston Globe, National Public Radio, U.S. News & World Report, BBC News, etc.), blogs, and commercial sites (WebMD, ESPN, Yahoo!, Amazon).

We'll skip the technical details, you'll just need to copy and paste the feed link you find into your feeder and you'll start receiving content. Often it ends with XML, which stands for (eXtensible Markup Language) and you'll often see an icon with a orange XML logo: .

Watch one of these short RSS videos to learn more: CNET.com RSS: feel the need for feeds? | RSS in Plain English (3.5 min each).

How Do I Set this up?

You can't just click on the RSS links, you'll need to set up an RSS aggregator to pull in the information you wish to track. If you have already upgraded to Office 2007, you can use Outlook 2007 or Internet Explorer 7 to obtain feeds. Another option is to set up a web based solution (Google Reader or Bloglines, My Yahoo!) or take advantage of free software that allows you to collect, organize, and display all the information feeds coming your way while you sleep, research, and go out to lunch.

MS Outlook 2007	On the Tools menu, click Account Settings. On the RSS Feeds tab, click New. In the New RSS Feed dialog box, type or press CTRL+V to paste the URL of the RSS Feed. For example, http://www.wpi.edu/News/RSS/multimedia.rss Click Add. Click OK.
Internet Explorer 7
Other free web based readers	Firefox Live Bookmarks \| Google Reader \| Bloglines \| My Yahoo \| NewsGator
A few desktop readers	RSSReader \| Juice - podcast receiver

Search & Find Feeds

If see these RSS, XML, ATOM Feed, or similar icons on your favorite websites, add them to your aggregator:
RSS Logos

Examples

News: Chronicle of Higher Education
Journals: Nature
Sports Updates: Red Sox
Events: Telegram & Gazette Calendar
Podcasts: New York Times
Shared bookmarks: Christine's @ del.icio.us
Flickr photostream: British Fungi and Lichens
Ticker feed: MSN Money News - XOM (ExxonMobil)

The possibilities expand daily. Blogs can be aggregated, even Webnote - an online tool for taking notes.

Gordon Library Feeds

Paste these URLs into your aggregator:

Search for Web Sites with RSS Feeds

Selected Journals with RSS Feeds

Selected Electronic Journals with RSS Table of Contents Feeds
Publishers providing RSS feeds
Ingenta Connect - Log into this WPI subscription to create journal alerts, search for journal title, choose Alerting Options, RSS

Selected WPI Library Databases with RSS Feeds

EBSCOhost: Business Source Premier or Humanities International Complete
Engineering Village - Compendex & INSPEC
ScienceDirect - custom searches, journal updates, citation alerts (Choose Save As, then go to Search History)
Web of Knowledge
PubMed - choose Send To, RSS feed
IEEE Explore - choose Alerts, set up an account [Vendor Help]

Populating Feeds in myWPI or Your Web Site

Post library, WPI, your own shared bookmarks, news or other feeds right into an item or annoucement in myWPI, your blog, website or other web spaces you control by using a Feed2JS generator.

Maintained by lib-webmaster@wpi.edu
Last modified: Mar 12, 2008, 08:39 EDT