Dear Friends,
I am forwarding one of my emails to another forum. Later on I thought
that I should also share it with you all. [I have tried to protect
the privacy of the person asking the question]
My answer provide a solution on how sites can be enhanced by
aggregating external content without any additional cost or time
(after setup).
The same solution can be implemented on Library Website of your own
Institution.
Hope it helps.
--Sukhdev Singh, NIC.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sukhdev Singh
Date: Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 9:35 AM
Subject: Re: [IAMI Gen] RSS Feeds for an external corporate site
What you are aiming at goes beyond just RSS Feeds. You will need one more step.
Let me try to explain you the steps you will require and examples of
my experiments in MASHUP.
Step 1.
Identifying the Resources: This is actually what you have asked for in
your mail. I would suggest you do the following (in that order)
a) - PubMed Search Strategy
The best resource is PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/.
However it is a huge database. You will have to design a Search
Strategy to get latest and relevant references from PubMed. Once you
are satisfied, create a feed as explained in my tutorial (slides).
This requires professional skills, I could have created a search
strategy for you, unfortunately I am busy for next week. [I will be
Chairing a session on "The Cochrane Library and EBM Resources" on 9th
April 2008 at CMC Vellore for the 2nd South Asian Regional Symposium
on Evidence Based Health Care, 'Investing in Evidence for Better
Health - http://www.cochrane-sacn.org/symposium2008/index.asp ]
b) - Look for core online Journals
Online journals (even the paid ones ) allow TOC of their issues pulled
through RSS. Open Access journals like those from BioMed Central
http://www.biomedcentral.com/ would be more useful as full text of
their issues can be read immediately. Further you may take help of
Directory of Open Access Journals http://doaj.org
Look for the URLs of their RSS Feeds. There are tools (like Dapper)
which can create feeds even for Non-RSS enabled sites. But to start
with, it is better to go with only ready-made feeds.
c) - Look for Blogs, forums, Wikis etc.
If you need more, then you can look for Blogs, Forums and Wikis. Most
of them provides RSS feeds.
Step 2.
You need to subscribe to all the feeds mentioned in above steps.
Google Reader is one of the many available services. If you like, you
can go for advance tricks for filtering useful content from your
aggregation of feeds. Yahoo Pipes is one such tool (It is difficult to
learn it). Once you are satisfied move to next step.
Step 3.
Well this I had touched in my slides but could not explain properly.
Reading RSS is different from making them available publicly. This is
sort of "MASHUP". There are abundant tools are available for doing it.
The simple ones are the likes of SuprGlu / NetVibes. (Google Reader
can also do it in limited manner). But these look unprofessional as
you won't like their logos etc. You can also create Widgets and add to
you site. Tools like feeddigest will allow to do that but they are
free only upto a limit. You can also have a blog on blogger and insert
you feeds easily (See my experiment mentioned below).
I had done few experiments which are still live (and does not cost
time or money to me).
One is on SuprGlu - http://sukhi.suprglu.com/ . It picks up references
from PubMed (slides are included in my presentation) for Medical
Informatics in Indian Context. However, you will notice the service
(SuprGlu) does some sort of advertisement.
Another one uses Yahoo Pipes to filter content. It give only those
content which has free full text on the topic - "Medical Informatics".
The feed is displayed using a Blog -
http://informaticsbits.blogspot.com/ from blogger.com
I would be glad to help you in your project but only after I return
from CMC (Medical College) Vellore.
--Sukhdev Singh, NIC.
On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 11:35 PM, clh < -- @gmail.com> wrote:
What types of RSS Feeds would you recommend for a corporate external/
publice site of a physician group practice management company?
--
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