I consider David Rothman the RSS feed advocate for medical libraries. He does so much with RSS feeds and he is constantly looking for instances where they are applicable to medical libraries. When I have an RSS feed question I pick his brain. His post How to: know when your organization appears in the news is a perfect example of how medical librarians can help their hospital administrators, marketing department, media relations department, public relations department, etc. how to easily keep up to date on news related to the hospital. It can also be used to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.

These users aren't doctors and may not always think of your library right away, providing this service just expands your services to that many more people within your organization. It also gets them thinking that the library might be helpful for more than just books and copies of journal articles.

For those of you interested in adding RSS feeds to your website check out Grazr, which the Librarian in Black describes as a "tool that will take an RSS feed and turn it into a neat little widget that you can put on any webpage." With the use of Javascript, Grazr allows you to specify which feed you are interested in and how it is displayed in your website (width, height of box, font, etc.) I will have to experiment a little bit with this to see how it works, or perhaps somebody else who has used it (David have you?) can fill us all in on how they use it and how can be integrated into the medical library webpage.