Week 1 - Blogs and RSS

I am starting this web log as an assignment for the MLA continuing education class, Web 2.0 101: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools. I hope that I can continue this web log after the course is over, and use this medium as a way to publish useful information about my experience in developing and operating an enterprise, digital medical library for a fairly large, nonprofit health care system. I am not one for keeping a diary or journal, so I only plan to post to the web log when I feel the information could be useful for other medical librarians working with digital libraries.

The first assignment included setting up an RSS reader and subscribing to 5 RSS feeds, including one journal's table of contents feed and one PubMed search. First, I set up a Google Reader account to aggregate RSS feeds. Since I am a member of our hospital's Applied Research Council on Evidence Based Practice, I decided to search for RSS feeds on the topic, "Evidence Based Nursing." Then I subscribed to the following RSS feeds that I discovered with the 'search and browse' function in Google Reader, and I grouped them in a folder labeled, Evidence Based Nursing.

Evidence Informed Nursing Practice Rename
http://einp.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Evidence-Based Nursing & Midwifery
http://evidence-based-nursing.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Evidence-Based Nursing current issue
http://ebn.bmjjournals.com/rss/current.xml

Nursing Research: Show me the evidence!
http://evidencebasednursing.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Wikispaces : mla-hls
http://mla-hls.wikispaces.com/page/xml/home?v=rss_2_0

I couldn't figure out how to subscribed to an RSS feed for a PubMed search in my Google Reader account. However, I have created automatic PubMed search updates for library patrons using in My NCBI.

How do I think RSS feeds can be used for our digital medical library? I plan to explore RSS feeds about Evidence Based Practice and integrate the data into the program for our hospital's Applied Research Council (ARC/EBP). Our library is currently providing automatic PubMed search updates and journal table of contents updates through My NCBI. Perhaps we can expand this service with RSS feeds from publishers and other sources.

How do I think patrons could use RSS feeds? Automatic subject search updates and journal table of contents updates to keep nursing policies and procedures up to date is a practical application, and we are currently providing this service. It will be interesting to discover new uses for RSS feeds by library patrons and digital libraries.