Using RSS for Research

There is an awful lot of information out there. And that's just on Wikipedia. Taken as a whole, the Internet is a vast field of data and unfiltered information that offers nearly unlimited potential for research. Whether you are a professor or a student, you will do research on the Internet. This can be a daunting task, as unlike with the old, book and print journal-based world of research, information on the Internet tends to drift and change over time.*

So, how to keep track of it all?

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is one way. You may have noticed these shiny orange icons on pages all over the Internet. Blogs, journals and newspapers uses them to let subscribers keep track of articles of interest. By saving the RSS link, you can stay informed of changes to websites of note. Your browser feeds the latest changes to your RSS folders and you can keep track of the sites you visit most without even having to go to the site.

But this is just one way to use RSS. Another is to syndicate your own research, so that collaborators can stay on top of the current project. By using an RSS enabled blog, you can post changes, discussion topics and updates, allowing your collaborators to keep up with the research process.

You can also create search feeds, like Google Alerts that will email you whenever your selected search term is mentioned online. This may end up dumping ridiculous amounts of useless links into your in box, so use a refined search term for your alert, not just one or two words.

But what happens if you are on the move and still need to do research? Say you're at a public computer – one which obviously doesn't have your RSS feeds bookmarked – what then?

Blinklist enables you to save your bookmarks to a website, making them accessible form anywhere. You only have to remember one url to gain access to the sites you need and you can organize them with tags and ratings to suit your interests. This lets you take yur research with you.

There is also Zotero, a plugin† designed to help manage your research, export citations and keep track of articles and journals. Zotero has the benefit of working with databases as well, allowing you to track, annotate and organize articles behind proprietary firewalls. You can even export citations.

Zotero v. 1.5 is in beta testing. This version has the added benefit of allowing you to back up your data and sync it across multiple computers.

So, don't be afraid of doing research online. We have the technology to keep track of that one pivotal article you need. Link it, syndicate it and move on to the next stage in the research process: writing that paper!


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* Obviously, it does in journals and books as well, but the pace of change on the internet is staggering. It may take years for a book to be updated and journals publish monthly corrections but these days, your research may change daily or even hourly, depending on your field.

† Firefox 2.0.* or 3.0, Netscape Navigator 9.0, or Flock 0.9.1 for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Synchronicity

So, you have a G-Mail account, Outlook Calendar, Zoho writer account and about a hundred other web sites and applications spread across the entire Internet.

And you ask yourself, "Is there a way to get all this web 2.0 stuff to work together?"

The answer is: Yes!

1. How to Sync Calendars

We all have calendars, or else we wouldn't know where to be and when. The problem is accessing that calendar in a way that makes it convenient and easy for others to find you as well. This problem is only compounded by the fact that there are several types of calendar programs out there and they don't always play nice. Maybe you use iCal on your Mac at home but Outlook at work. You've tried to migrate to Google Calendar, but that means you just have a third way to confuse people and yourself.

There is a way to not only share your calendars but get them all to agree and auto update. Mostly. While there are instructions for manually syncing your iCal Calendar to Google calendar, you can't as of yet, get iCal and Outlook to play nice. Nor is it possible to have all your calendars allow for updates across platform. Google Calendar works best for this need, as you can access it from the web. However, if you need to share your Google calendar with coworkers who only use Outlook, this can be a challenge. But not an insurmountable one.

Google Calendar Sync is an application developed by Google Labs to allow you to sync your Google Calendar with Outlook:

Today, we're pleased to announce a tool to sync Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook calendar. If you add an event in your Microsoft Outlook calendar, it will automatically sync to Google Calendar and be accessible at any time, whether you're using a browser or a mobile phone. Similarly, if you schedule an event with a future pop-up reminder in Google Calendar, you will automatically see that reminder in your Microsoft Outlook calendar on your computer. Your Microsoft Outlook calendar and Google Calendar are automatically kept up to date, leaving you free to use whichever one you want.

Another option for syncing not just calendars but also websites and links is Plaxo. This is a site that acts as a hub for your websites and web 2.0 applications, such as social networking and file sharing sites. There is a free version that supports basic cross-platform syncing, though the more advanced features require you to buy a subscription ($49.95/year).

2. How to Sync Web Sites and Web-based Applications

There's no real way to sync everything. But a lot of things work together in ways that make it surprisingly easy to navigate between your desktop and the web.

Blinklist let's you bookmark all the sites you want to keep track of and access them from any computer, as they are saved on the web on your Blinklist page.

You can rank the sites, add notes and use social networking tags to organize websites according to your needs and tastes. Have something personal you don't want the world to see? Make it private. Want to share a link with a friend? There's a quick and easy way to send it via EMail.

Zoho and Google Docs allow you to upload, share and collaborate on word documents, spreadsheets and

presentations in a way that allows you to track changes and drafts.

And of course there is Google Sites, which allow you to build your own little corner of the web, customized to keep track of all your other sites, applications and accounts.

Why Should Academics Use Blogs?

Blogging is not just about telling the world what you ate for lunch, ranting about politics, or posting pictures of your cat. It's a powerful tool for sharing information. Sharing: this is the key. It's writing and responding, creating a forum for discussing topics of interest. These topics can be politics or your cat but they can also be of an academic nature.

Several academic blogs already exist and have created around them a community for sharing in the academic lifestyle and generating new ideas. Again, the key here is sharing ideas. Blogs allow academics a little more wiggle room to brainstorm. You can toss out an idea in a post and get some feedback. See what works, what doesn't. Get informal criticism and advice in the early stages of the research process behind whatever project you currently are working on or are about to begin. And even when you're done you can publish a rough draft of the material on your blog and keep the refinement process going by starting a discussion.

Blogs allow academics to circumvent the usual obstacles to sharing information and networking. You don't have to wait for the next conference or for the journal to hit the newsstands. Share your ideas as you have them. Collaborate over long distance. And it's not just the open editorial system that allows you to share ideas in one direction. You can keep up with the latest research and ideas, before they get into the journals by reading blogs.

the basics-- what you need to get started

1. Choose a blogging platform (blogger, typepad, wordpress, etc)
2. Set up an account
3. Generate content

note: University Relations is developing templates for blogs.

Also, if you are interested in having your blog hosted on the University domain, contact the University Relations web team.

Using Social Networking Tags in a Library Setting

Web 2.0 Presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: technology libraries)

Using Social Networking Tags in a Library Setting, a Presentation given at Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon on 7/9/08 by Keith Kisser


SlideShare Link

Social Networking Tags have become a widely used method for people to keep track of websites and web content. Tags also have the potential to provide an alternate method of providing access to the library. This is creating a major shift in the perception of libraries as a place that is not just where books are kept, but as a hub where you can go to get online and find whatever it is you are looking for. Librarians need to be able to meet the needs of this changing attitude towards information. One way that web 2.0 technology allows us to do this is with user-based classification and organization. Tags provide a familiar point of reference for using the OPAC, allowing users to become accustomed to relating tags to subject headings.

Tags are based on Folksonomy, which is “The practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.” Tags are how people organize data on a personal level, in contrast to traditional subject indexing, as done in the library setting. Tags are a level of metadata generated not by experts but by creators and consumers of content. Usually, tags are made up of freely chosen keywords instead of controlled vocabulary.

Currently, the Web is in transition. It used to be that the library was a point of access to the Internet. That is, the Web was just one of the services that the library offered, and often times, one not given any special place or priority. This was web 1.0. The slow days. The dial-up days. The days of newsgroups and chat rooms and really slow email.

Today, we have Web 2.0. There are no longer any solid barriers between a service provider and the user. It used to be that the Web had content. Today, the Web is content. Nonlinear. Nonphysical. Broadband. BitTorrent. YouTube.

And there is a lot of it. Millions of websites. Wikipedia has over 10 million articles. Youtube has over 3 Billion videos shared by 79 Million members. Sure, a lot of it is Lolcats and Eddie Izzard clips but some of it is academic blogs and original research. When you find these needles in an infinite haystack, how do you organize them? With Tags.

Everyone who does anything online for any length of time uses Tags. It’s an easy way to keep track of your favorite websites and content across multiple platforms. And that’s the point. Tags are flexible, allow people to share content with others and access their content from anywhere. And notice it’s their content. Even if they did not have a hand in physically creating it, they have made it theirs by customizing it and commenting on it. Content is now a shared, collaborative thing. Not just a commodity created by one person and bought by another.

Del.icio.us is a Web tool that allows users to tag websites and online content according to their own wants and needs. Del.icio.us uses Tags which can be collected in bundles, which organize lists of Tags into general groups.

A library could have one account used by all the librarians and staff, allowing them to collect useful resources and gather them together in course specific Bundles.

Another useful service is LibraryThing, which allows people to catalog their personal library using Tags and allows for users to rate and review their books, like on Amazon.com. Bibliographic data is drawn from Amazon.com, the Library of Congress and more than 680 libraries worldwide. LibraryThing incorporates Library-style records with Social Networking content such as reviews, tags and book swapping. LibraryThing also offers a service integrating Tags into your library OPAC. This service is affordable, easy to plug into existing web catalogs and expands subject heading access points to users both in LibraryThing and in the OPAC.

Another useful service for libraries to consider is Flickr, which lets people organize, share and print their photos online. Flickr also uses tags and allows comments for individual photos. Users have a lot of flexibility in creating collections of up to 200 images. This is easier then creating a custom built digital library and much easier to maintain, update and manage.

Flickr is useful for libraries because people like pictures. Having an image to relate to goes a long way to making the library catalog more user-friendly.

Flickr is also a great example of Crowdsourcing, “taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.”

Recently, the Library of Congress put more than 3,000 images from their collection of historic photos on Flickr. People all over the world are contributing comments, aiding the Library of Congress by contributing information about the images. Recently, George Eastman’s House has done the same, and put over 200 historical pictures on Flickr, including several hand colored autochromes.

In an academic library, this can provide wider exposure to little-used collections and can allow for faculty, staff, students and the general public to contribute additional information in comments. It can also promote the libraries collections and bring more people into the library.

Not everyone is a cataloger – this is a good thing. Tagging online content creates a familiarity with the concept of cataloging, using collections, OPACs and libraries. Using tags teaches people how to use an organizational system, relating it to familiar systems they use every day. They also allow patrons a way to contribute to the collection in a way that highlights how they use the catalog, allowing librarians to adapt this information to how we structure the library’s interface and making the OPAC more user-friendly.

Any questions?