Week 1: RSS feeds at my library?

"How do you think you could use RSS feeds at your library? How do you think patrons could use RSS feeds?"

I'll be using RSS feeds in a new and fabulous way at my library: to check faculty publications as we streamline compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.

First, a bit of background: I'm coordinating the support for my organization's NIH Public Access Policy compliance effort. We've created an Institute Publications System (IPS) in Microsoft SharePoint to harness publications information from acceptance for publication through submission to PubMed Central via that NIH Manuscript submission system and incorporation into our institutional repository. One of the last steps involves checking the records within the IPS to be sure that we have tracked all articles.

We'll be using RSS feeds of PubMed queries (limits: author AND last 180 days). Since PubMed Central doesn't yet have a feed, we'll have to do a bit of digging to piece all of the data together. However, the feeds will save us time because we won't have to recreate queries at quarterly intervals, find the correct name authority record, limit by date, then sort results. We're leveraging myNCBI accounts to create multiple feeds for multiple authors at one time, then relying on the feed to provide updates for a time frame of interest.