Ebsco adds RSS feeds

Thanks to Lisa's email, we know that Ebsco now offers RSS feeds for their searches. This is just like the RSS feeds in our catalog. Where you do a search and then ask the database to alert you when any article or book is added to the database that fits your search criteria.

Back in library school they talked about making libraries and librarians more relevant to the research by re-doing the same search for a patron on a monthly basis and forwarding them any new results.

This is a great step to making our many resources personal to the patron. For example, a student wishes to do a paper on "Global Warming". They do the search (preferably at the beginning of the semester) for "global warming" in ebsco and set up a RSS alert. Now any article that is added to the database is automatically fed to their aggregator or news/rss reader (like bloglines).

another example, if a patron invests in the Exxon corporation and wants to track their activities, they can search ebsco for "exxon", set up a rss alert and have all the articles shipped to them.

All you have to do is to select "Advanced Search", do the search, see the results, then click Create Alert for this search"


But a super step toward making the library personal for each individual user!