I have read David Rothman’s blog and listened to him talk about RSS feeds often. In the back of my mind I knew what he was saying about tagging and RSS feeds was important but my brain was always a half step behind his message. But finally, I have to say, I get it! I think I understand some of the possible outreach opportunities tagging RSS feeds can do. Sorry David, I am a little slow at times.

So here is what I finally discovered (with the help of David).
One of coolest things is that del.icio.us tags can be made into RSS feeds that you can monitor. Why on earth would I or my users want to monitor a specific de.licio.us tag?
As the librarian I can create a del.icio.us account for my library. I can then create tags for various departments within the hospital (cardiology, OBGYN, pediatrics, nursing).
Then as I run across news items, web sites and articles I can tag them according to the appropriate department.
Library users can subscribe to the tag feed and will be notified whenever I tag an item that falls within their discipline.

How do you do this?
It is really easy.... Let's say your are a library user at UBHSL (which has a del.icio.us account) you can go to http://del.icio.us/UBHSL
Let’s say you are interested in all articles with the tag medicine (I know this is broad but it works as an example), click on the tag medicine and you will see every item they tagged with the term medicine.
If you want to subscribe to that medicine feed, go to the URL http://del.icio.us/UBHSL/medicine and copy it. Go to your feed reader (I use Bloglines) and click add a feed, and paste the URL http://del.icio.us/UBHSL/medicine into the box and click subscribe.

Every time the librarian tags an article with medicine you will get an update in your feed reader account.

As I mentioned the term medicine is probably too general, but it served as a nice example here. It probably would be more beneficial if you created tags for specific hospital departments or research interests. Then you could create a page listing the feeds that library users could subscribe too.

You can create user monitored feeds with CiteULike as well. However, I think CiteULike can be a little picky if you don’t use one of their “supported” sites. You have to manually enter the information, blah. For example PubMed and NEJM work great on CiteULike (because they are supported sites) but JAMA doesn’t work and you get an error message. Yuck.

You can monitor user feeds using Connotea, but I am not sure if you can if you can drill it down to the specific user feed and a specific tag like you can with del.icio.us or CiteULike.

I am sure David has figured this all out before and knows way more than I do, but like I said the light bulb finally went on in my brain and I thought I would share it with everybody. If you have other ways tagging and RSS feeds can be helpful or if you have more to add on to my “ah ha” moment, please leave a comment.