Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Final assignment for LIBR525: Information Technology is to write about an application of a new technology which interests you (with a scenario that you are writing a report for your manager in your first job after graduating from the MLIS). I chose to write about RSS, and it's starting to come together, but it was a fair struggle. Not that I don't understand it (well, I've got the basics) but how to express that on paper in a non-techie way without going into long-winded explanations about what XML is and how RSS relates to it, etc.

On the positive side, my real manager has said he wants to read the report, and he's keen for us to run a feed from here to the New Zealand government portal. And one benefit of the research I've been doing is that I found Hubmed, an interface for Pubmed that enables you to create an RSS feed of a search query, and read it in your newsreader. That's going to be incredibly useful. And here was me thinking that the RSS of Reuters Health was going to be useful (well, it will, but not compared to this).

I'm happy.

| posted by Simon at 4:58 pm