Google Reader-based Monitoring Services

Having failed to work out the ins and outs of copyright and intellectual property regarding other people’s feeds and Yahoo Pipes, I’ve spent some considerable time over the last couple of weeks setting up some services using Google Reader.

They’re predicated on Google Reader’s share feature, which allows you to pick up the headlines of a range of posts and feature them on a web page. Displaying the headlines was my goal, as the twin aims of my monitoring services are to drive traffic to the many wonderful blogs in the AOD sector and to provide people with a way to keep-up-to-date: I’m hoping that these services will be a tipping point for the more technophobic amongst the drugs worker community.

The main services are a Blog Directory, which lists individual blogs on the right and provides the latest ten headlines from their feeds on the left, and the Journal Monitor. For as long as I have worked at DrugScope, researchers have been asking for an alerting service for journal tables of contents, so it’s a real buzz to have got this in place before I leave. Most of the major journals have RSS or Atom feeds, and those that don’t are available in PubMed, which, as you know, allows for the creation of RSS on the fly.

A couple of the smaller publications don’t have either publisher or PubMed feeds, but I really do mean a couple, so it should be straightforward to push those out through Connotea, using the tag I’ve designed for this very purpose. Similarly, single articles in non-drug publications can be added through Connotea. Before I leave, I’ll set up a Connotea account for our generic info email address, with the journals monitor tag and add its RSS to the Google Reader account.

It’s really that simple. In Google Reader, I set up some generic tags – blogs, journals, commentary, news and references. Then I added the feeds and categorised them using those tags. Each tag is shared, giving it its own page – e.g. this is the shared page for the blogs tag It was simple then to pick up the feed and put it into the Blog Directory web page which as well as having the look and feel we wanted, allowed me to list the blogs we’re covering.

It was a bit fiddly in places – especially setting up all the PubMed feeds, but the major breakthrough was working out the generic tags that would be useful for our user group and the feed format that would give full attribution and impetus to drive traffic to the originating sites.

The plus-points I can see are:

• people can find the major AOD feeds and can subscribe to aggregated feeds
• OR they can subscribe to the individual feeds having found them on our site
• the headlines feature will hopefully drive traffic to the originating sites
• researchers can see current contents of journals, a service we knew they longed for
• unlike our work blog, which lists new catalogue additions, these services are not limited to material we are buying
• information about new articles etc. is not delayed by an intervening manual process (cataloguing) that is tied to our maintenance of a physical library collection and that has no relevance to those who are not using that physical collection
• hopefully, it will drive more people to sign up for newsreaders as they have some ready-made aggregated feeds to add to them

Down sides:

• Google Reader is still a beta service
• our website couldn’t cope with the Java Script for the feeds, so they’re sited on our Google Pages
• because it’s predicated on the share feature, when you add a new feed you get everything in that feed, cause you’ve essentially just shared all of it. This could clog up the ‘headlines’ boxes for a short time.
• automatically updating the sector with new content is great, but it means that updating can no longer be used as an argument in favour of cataloguing (although the overwhelmingly important argument of retrievability still holds good)
• automatically updating takes the onus away from staff – which is great – but one way my subject knowledge and awareness of scholarship in the area developed is through spending three years with pretty much everything published passing across my desk. Not sure that reading an aggregated feed would do that. Though cataloguing would.

Anyway, my day today has been about finishing these services off, publishing them and posting about them on our blog – here. I also did an information literacy post on newsreaders called Take 5 Minutes to Keep Up-To-Date - a task made much easier thanks to the constantly wonderful Common Craft Show - whatever did we do before their ‘Plain English’ series?

Nine days left in the office (though non-sequentially), and I just wish every one of them could be as satisfying as today.