Sunday, February 25, 2007

Nitty Gritty Stuff

Now that my maternity leave is over and that I'm back at work, I suspect that my blog is going to become a little bit more focused on the nitty gritty of library technology.

Right now I'm submerging myself into the world of RefWorks once again and am becoming consumed with how I can get it to link in and out of our library's opac and databases and my university's soon to be launched 'learning management system' and 'portal'.

I knew that RefWorks offered a means to 'search' RSS feeds but until today, I wasn't sure why they added this functionality. If you wanted to read RSS feeds, why would you choose to use RefWorks over a free service such as Bloglines or Yahoo? But I now I think I know why.

If you create an RSS feed in a service such as PubMed...
pubmed rss

And add this feed into RefWorks...
refworks rss

You will be able to browse the most recent citations that match your search and add the citations directly into your RefWorks account...
refworks import rss

I'm not sure whether this functionality extends beyond PubMed so I will be investigating further.

2 comments:

md said...

hello,
just to confirm the rss feature works with any rss feed (and can be interesting for journals providing rss feeds)

Mita said...

Hey Marlene

I should have been more clear. What struck me about the PubMed feed was that the RSS feed was already formatted for immediate input into RefWorks. All the other RSS feeds I've tried (and I have only tried a small sample) provide a single link back to the article in question.

Mita