When I use the term feeds, I mean any of several types of web files used primarily by blogs, news sites, and other frequently updated websites to distribute content, including text, images, sound, and video content. Feeds go by many names: RSS feeds, news feeds, site feeds, XML feeds, syndication, channels, and others. The availability of a feed is usually indicated on web pages with a small graphic (known as a chicklet) or with a “Syndicate this site” or “RSS” link.
Feeds make it possible for you to stay current with news items and blog postings from dozens or hundreds of sites without having to visit each of those sites repeatedly to find out if it has been updated. You subscribe to and read feeds with a special program called a news aggregator or feed reader. Aggregators and readers include programs loaded onto your computer, such as FeedDemon, or websites, such as My Yahoo! and Bloglines. You can also subscribe to feeds by email, using services such as RMail or FeedBlitz.
Using the aggregator or reader of your choice, you subscribe to feeds for the websites and blogs that interest you. When blogs and other websites with feeds are updated, their feeds are also updated with headlines and frequently with excerpts or full-text. Your aggregator or reader automatically checks the feeds to which you have subscribed, collects the new information, and organizes and displays it in reverse chronological order. Simply by checking your aggregator for new items, you can review new information from many sources in a matter of minutes.
Most law librarians monitor a large number of information sources, either for professional current awareness or to watch for information of interest to patrons. Perhaps the most obvious thing that feeds can do for you is help you monitor news sites and blogs. These sites are frequently updated, and visiting each individual site can take a lot of your time. When sites are very frequently updated, older information is pushed off the front page. You would have to visit some sites more than once a day or miss some entries.
Using a feed reader to monitor the feeds of news sites and blogs can save you time in two ways. First, a feed is only updated when its website is updated, and an updated feed only contains the new information. Second, you only have to look in one place to see all the updates. All feeds to which you have subscribed can be aggregated and displayed in your feed reader.
Law.com is an example of a legal news site that has a feed. Jurist, a legal news and research service based at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, tracks law-related news and primary source materials and makes them available on its Paper Chase website and through its feed. Several sections of the ABA, including Environment, Energy and Resources; Law Practice Management; Litigation; and the Legal Technology Resource Center, also have feeds for their news. For more examples, see the Virtual Chase’s extensive list of RSS News Feeds for Law.
Law-related blogs are also important current awareness sites. SCOTUSblog focuses on the U.S. Supreme Court and has a feed. There are a number of legal blogs with feeds at Law Professors Blogs. To find law- and legal-related blogs, go to blawg.
Another important way that feeds can help you is by monitoring government information. Federal agencies make news and announcements, product recalls, proposed regulations, reports, statistics, and other information available through feeds. See FirstGov’s RSS Library.
Most states are not yet taking full advantage of feeds to distribute government information. As with previous uses of the internet to distribute state government information, some states are far ahead in their use of RSS technology, but the others will catch up soon.
Last summer the National Library of Medicine announced the availability of feeds for delivery of daily updated search results from PubMed. See instructions for creating and subscribing to PubMed feeds from the NLM Technical Bulletin.
Auto Recalls is a public interest project of Justia.com, a company that designs and optimizes law firm websites. You can subscribe to feeds of recall information for All Vehicle Makes, a single manufacturer, a particular model, or a model and year.
PubSub is a matching service to which you can subscribe to feeds to receive updates when new content is created that matches your subscription. With PubSub SEC Filings, you can subscribe to receive notifications of SEC filings by company, subject or form type.
The Washington & Lee School of Law Library has created a nice service to which you can subscribe to receive Current Law Journal Content. Set up a profile to subscribe to a feed containing tables of contents from as many or as few journals as you choose.
Subscribe to customized searches of blogs and news with Yahoo and Feedster, and news searches with Google. Use feeds to track UPS and USPS packages at Simple Tracking. There are feeds for National Weather Service watches, warnings, and advisories; comic strips; new music and video releases; and almost any current information need.
Feeds can also help you distribute information to library patrons. The easiest way to create a feed is to publish the information you want to distribute in a blog. Most blogging software will automatically create and update one or more feeds. At our library, we started the Law Dawg Blawg to enable us to distribute “research tips, library announcements, news and links of interest” quickly and easily. This semester I also started a course blog as part of CALI’s Legal Education Podcasting Project, which I use to distribute audio summaries of each week’s legal research class and other course materials via feeds.
If you want to distribute new and updated information that won’t fit into the blog format, you can create a feed by hand, provided you are willing to work with the raw code. The coding used to create feeds is fairly simple, but you have to remember to update the feed whenever you update something on your website. We have a feed to alert our users to new research guides, acquisitions, electronic resources, and other updates to the website. This feed is for simple announcements only, and I usually only update it once a week. There are services to which you can subscribe that will create feeds for websites, but we didn’t need a service for our situation.