Keeping Current

Make those library databases work for you! Many of the databases to the research literature permit you to save a search that will pull citations, either weekly or monthly (you choose), and email you that retrieval—provided there is new content that matches your saved search. These alerts are easy to set up and are especially useful for ongoing research where you will want to keep track of a particular topic over time.

For more information about email alerts (and RSS feed options), see the Libraries’ Alerts and RSS page. Steenbock librarians are also happy to assist you with selecting a database and constructing the search.

Keeping Current, Workshop 2/27

Do you feel overwhelmed by the challenge of keeping up with the literature in your field of study or research? This workshop will share several tools that can help you save time and maximize your efficiency for staying up-to-date with that information.

Learn how to create a custom list of library databases or have table of contents of the most recent journals sent directly to your email.
Be alerted to the most recent articles on a topic.
Monitor Websites, blogs and other important resources with ease.
Keep track of citations and make bibliographies quickly.

The workshop is structured to allow plenty of time for hands-on exploration of resources.

Keeping Current with the Literature
Wednesday February 27 (12:30 - 2:00 PM)
Steenbock Library, Room 105

New MadCat Features

Records from the MadCat catalog will now bear a “Where is this Location” link. This link will take you to a page with information about the holding library. If the location is an electronic one, there will be a help page leading you to follow the “Internet Link.”

If you desire to keep up with what has been recently added to the campus library catalog (mostly records to new items in campus libraries), then subscribing to the new RSS feeds will be your convenient tool for this task.

From the New in MadCat page, you can follow links to subscribe to RSS feeds, either by Subject areas or by campus library locations.

Scitopia.org

Search portal Scitopia.org, was created with the collaboration of 15 professional science & technology societies to search the contents of the digital libraries of the participating societies, government documents from the DOE Information Bridge and patents from the USPTO and European and Japanese patent databases.

Simple and advanced search options are supplied with the advanced search enabling limits by date and by publisher/society. Retrieval sorts records by society, patents and government documents (as indicated by tabs).

In some instances, particularly to government documents, full-text may be available. While purchasing options are supplied to content retrieved using Scitopia.org, campus libraries often enjoy subscription access to society journals or may already have the document in their collections. Do consult Find It for locating journal articles or MadCat for documents and conference proceedings. If you need assistance, contact a Steenbock librarian.

For publications that campus libraries do not have access, place a request with Library Express.

Many of the Scitopia.org partners also supply free email alerts and RSS feeds to news and newly-published journal articles.

RSS Journal Feeds (Ebling Library)

Do you use RSS to keep current with the literature in your field of research or study? If so, you may find the journal feeds collected and organized by library staff at Ebling Library to be particularly useful for that purpose. The list of journal feeds ranging from such disciplines as allergy and immunology to genetics and genomics to nutrition and dietetics to virology can be browsed by these subject areas or alphabetically by journal title. Subscribing to each journal feed will furnish a “table of contents” to the most recent edition of that particular journal. A selection of feeds is also supplied to news sources for general health, medicine, NIH research and pharmacy.

There are a variety of feed-readers available for your use including Bloglines or Google Reader, among others. The Ebling journal feed site includes general information about RSS and feed-readers. Additional information about feed-readers can also be found at the campus Libraries’ Alerts and RSS Feeds page.

UW Digital Collections, Lesson Plans and RSS Feed

How might you use UW Digital Collections in your teaching and learning?

Not only do the digital collections grant you access to primary literature and imagery in many topics and disciplines, the collections staff invites you to browse sample lesson plans or to submit your own. Once reviewed and accepted, the lesson plans utilizing UW Digital Collections content will be entered into the ide@s database where other Wisconsin educators can access them.

Keep up-to-date on new collections and news from UW Digital Collections by subscribing to its RSS feed.

Keeping Current using RSS Feed-Readers (or News Aggregators)

RSS or "Really Simple Syndication," is an XML format for sharing syndicated information—generally, frequently-changing information—on the Web. RSS enables you to monitor Websites for new information without needing to visit each site or database.

Some RSS readers are freely-available to Web users; these include Bloglines or My Yahoo.

Many news sites and publication Websites supply RSS feeds of new/current information and/or research. Using a feed-reader enables you to view all of these feeds of news and research information in one place. Within a feed-reader, the feed will show a short description with a link to the full content.

Subscribe to a feed by entering the feed's link (URL in browser address bar) into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon to initiate a subscription process.

A subscription maps a feed to the user’s reader. Look for feed links on a feed service page or from a site’s main/home page or look for icons on the page or from within the browser’s URL address bar.

While feeds are commonly found at many news sites (BBC, CNN, Guardian, among many others), feeds are also available from the following research news sites:

Biology News Net

EurekAlert

PLOS (Public Library of Science)

Using the Bloglines Feed-Reader

Visit: http://www.bloglines.com/

Create an account: http://www.bloglines.com/register/

The Bloglines login is your email address; the password you create must be six characters in length (and ideally, not easily guessed).

Once you are logged in, you will be able to subscribe to feeds and to organize them into folders or categories of feed information.

For additional information about RSS readers, see:

http://www.library.wisc.edu/alerts/more-about-rss.html