Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology by Michael Stephens has a long but interesting (and long) post of how a medical librarian is using RSS feeds for current awareness search for physicians.

I think it is great that this medical librarian is utilizing new technologies to help and serve our patrons. Too often we read and see new technologies but we wonder how it applies to libraries or specificially medical libraries. I think there are three types of people in the world. The visionaries, those who actually created blogging technologies, RSS feeds, podcasts, etc. They are often on the bleeding edge of technology and are the orginial adopters of those technologies. The adapters, those who can see the emerging technology and create a use for it that can be easily applied other technologies, situations, and life. They are the ones who often make that all important connection betweent the technology and its practical use in medical libraries (or business or education). Finally, the implementors are the ones who take the information or application and install it or implement it into their workplace. Some people are more of one type of person than another, but the beautiful part is that the world needs all three types of people.

However, there are a few bones I have to pick about this issue (not with Michael Stephens nor the medical librarian). Specifically, with RSS feeds and full text. The medical librarian specifically mentions signing up the doctor for Google Reader. I checked out Google Reader and Bloglines (my own feed reader) and I am still unimpressed with how PubMed citations are displayed in the RSS feeds. There are some links to the full text of the article, BUT the library LinkOut icons DO NOT come over in the feed. Only the publisher's icons are displayed. This is not good. As you know medical libraries have multiple ways of providing the full text of an article to their users. For example Lippincott Williams and Wilkins journals are NOT available from LWW's site to institutional subscribers. Institutional subscribers must access those journals through Ovid. Most of your library users are going to click on the full text icon from the publisher (because the library icon isn't there) and be disappointed when they are met with a message to pay for the article. Worse yet some might pay!

The answer to this is NOT to have the user just email the wanted article citation to the library staff to get. That is not a technological advancement that is a step backwards. That is just like the user doing a PubMed search and then emailing the library for all of their articles when the full text is available with just a click of a mouse. The library icons should be right there next to the publisher icons so that the user never needs to ask the library for the full text. The only time the user should need to ask for the library's help is when the article is not available.

Inquisitive users and librarians will note that in Bloglines users just have to click on the title of the citation and are brought to the actual PubMed citation where the library LinkOut buttons are displayed. In Google Reader, users can click on the citation title or "show orginal item" and are also brought to the PubMed citation with LinkOut buttons. But the fact is most users aren't going to do that, they will most likely click on the publisher's icon to get the full text. If the publisher's icons can come into the feed reader with the citations then the library LinkOut buttons should as well.

I am slightly bothered to promote RSS feeds when PubMed email alerts allow my users quicker and easier access to the article. They LIKE not asking for articles we own. They LIKE clicking on the LinkOut icon and immediately seeing the full text of the article. I know some of my users would be extremely disappointed with RSS feeds because they wouldn't be able get the full text of the article. To them that would offset and benerfits they might get with using a feed reader.

We are almost there. We are so close we can taste it. But we need RSS feeds from PubMed to include the library links to full text, or else we won't be able to provide the seemless access to full text imformation that many of our users want.