I couldn’t find an up-to-date list of dedicated UK academic library Twitter accounts, so I created one. It’s openly-editable in Google Docs, so if I’ve missed off a UK university library, please feel free to add it (or correct any mistakes).
Posts Tagged ‘RSS’
Where have you been all my life?
Posted on November 22nd, 2011 by Paul StainthorpThis is something of a ‘hobby’ rather than a work-related library blog post.
I recently started using Foursquare, the “location-based social networking website“, and it’s got me thinking (again) about genning up on geolocation and how to handle geodata in practical, mashup-y ways. (My brother works with geographical information systems and geodata professionally; I’m a bit of a cartophile at heart; I’m interested in library geolocation and space/time services – I’d like to bring all of these things together and really learn how to handle web mapping data properly.)
So: I’ve begun to mess around with location data that I’m producing myself, through various sites on which I have a profile, and which is available in KML or some other standard geodata format.
Including…
1. My Foursquare check-in location data, available from foursquare.com/feeds, as KML.
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2. The locations of photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr, accessible from a feed at the bottom of my photostream page as KML (most recent few photos only).
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3. Tweets geotagged using Twitter’s (often somewhat unreliable/easily-distracted) location service. This was the most complicated: taking my RSS feed of recent tweets at http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/pstainthorp.rss and feeding it through this Yahoo! Pipe results in this KML file.
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4. Find which other [social] websites might be offer up geotagged feeds of my activity.
5. Mashup! I’m reading up on the Google Maps APIs, which are the standard tool for manipulating KML in a web browser. (It’s not possible to display multiple KML files in the standard maps.google.co.uk display, though you can do so easily in Google Earth.)
6. ???
7. Profit!
An Orbital project reading list
Posted on October 4th, 2011 by Paul StainthorpThe Orbital project has now formally begun. As ‘lead researcher’, I’m making a start by building a reading list of material related to research data management.
In fact, we’re going to be setting aside offline reading mornings as a part of the project calendar, so that I (and the project team) have the time to read through the considerable literature around MRD.
The reading list is stored in RefWorks for the moment, at: http://lncn.eu/hmx5 
If you have any suggestions for books, articles, or papers that the project team ought to be reading, we’d be very grateful.
Smartening up the catalogue for September
Posted on August 4th, 2011 by Paul StainthorpWe’re making a few changes to the home page of our library catalogue in time for the new academic year. Changes include:
- Reduced ‘tabset’ browsing to only the most important elements of the catalogue.
- Use of the newest version of the University’s Minerva logo and colour scheme.
- Home page used for ‘top 10′ (…ish) links to Library services elsewhere on the web – these are served up using an RSS feed via Feed2JS (so that we can display the same links in other environments such as Blackboard). All placed in one of HiP’s lovely XSL stylesheets.
Very many thanks to the new LNCD intern Jamie Mahoney for help with styling this!
Here’s the current, ‘old’ front page:
And here’s the new, redesigned page – still in development!
You can have a look at it, if you like, at:
This isn’t intended as a long-term solution for the question of the Library’s web presence. There’s a lot more we need to do to consolidate and simplify the information we present to users across different environments (open web, intranet/Portal, Blackboard VLE, etc.). But it’s a good short-to-medium-term fix which makes the most of the tools we have available at the moment, and recognises the value of establishing www.library.lincoln.ac.uk as the home of our ‘primary’ presence on the web. If nowt else, that’s the address we’re printing on our induction materials 
We also had to work out a way of testing this on one of our public-access OPAC kiosks. I was particularly proud of this little MARC hack which allowed us to navigate to the test version of the home page without having to use the browser navigation bar (which is disabled on the kiosks).
Fun things to do with JournalTOCs
Posted on June 9th, 2011 by Paul StainthorpI’ve been meaning to write this up for a while. I think JournalTOCs is excellent, and it’s nice to see they’ve used their recent redesign/relaunch to make the site much more usable. JournalTOCs is one of those things—LibraryThing‘s another—where I don’t understand why more library people (especially subject/research support librarian types) aren’t raving about it.
Put simply: JournalTOCs is a tool to search for (and within) the Tables of Contents for electronic journals which are available as RSS feeds. You can find it at: www.journaltocs.ac.uk
“JournalTOCs is the largest, free collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs): 16,424 journals (including 2,149 Open Access journals) from 840 publishers.”
(An aside: what did happen to the suspiciously-similar ticTOCs? Were the two projects/services related? Is JournalTOCs just the ‘production’ version of the ticTOCs experiment? Or were they in competition somehow? I can’t seem to tell.)
Here are some of the fun things you can do with JournalTOCs:
- Search for articles within journal by keyword – as well as for the journal itself by name or ISSN;
- Browse for journals by subject or publisher;
- Export individual article references to RefWorks;
- Register for a JournalTOCs account, sign in, then select journals to ‘follow’ by ticking a box next to each one. You can then export your followed list of journals as an OPML file—effectively, a bundle of RSS feeds—and import the bundle into a feed reader of your choice. (OPML is itself quite cool.)
For instance – here’s an OPML bundle of food science journals to which the Holbeach Campus Library has a subscription. I created it by searching for and following those journals in JournalTOCs, then going to my full list of followed journals (at: http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/followedJournals.php) and clicking the ‘Save & Export‘ link at the bottom of the screen. This creates an OPML file of your followed journals, which you need to save to your computer.
I can then go to my Google Reader account and upload the OPML file (you’ll find the option to do that under the Settings > Reader settings menu). JournalTOCs have a little help guide of the process you’ll need to follow in Google Reader. Other feed readers (srsly? There are other feed readers?) will do something similar.
Once you’ve uploaded your OPML bundle to G. Reader, you’ll probably want to add all the TOC feeds to the same folder (I created one called ‘foodjournals’). It would be really nice if Google Reader allowed you to specify a destination folder on import (similar to what RefWorks does): instead you have to do this manually – unless I’m missing something?
- JournalTOCs has a set of monster APIs, well-documented, with calls for both journals and articles. We’re hoping to make some productive and constructive use of those APIs as part of the Jerome project (that’s another blog post I need to write), but frankly this sort of thing is a Mashed Librarian’s dream. I’m already [mashup alert! mashup alert!] started using the APIs (amongst others) to populate a Google Spreadsheet with information about food science journals by ISSN. Then we use the spreadsheet to mailmerge to a PowerPoint show which forms our rolling digital photo frame mini-display at Holbeach. (This is probably another blog post I ought to write up.)
![photo_ejournals_frame [old photo]](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5214/5425127994_54e2f890b1_m.jpg)
- There’s a user API as well, which you can use to retrieve a list of the journals followed by a registered user of JournalTOCs (identified by email address). So, if I wanted to share my list of favourited journals, instead of publishing an OPML file I could just provide a link to: http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/api/user/paul@paulstainthorp.com – this is more dynamic than OPML, in that if I start following a new journal, it’ll automatically be picked up by the API, without my having to export a new OPML file each time;
- JournalTOCs also provide advice for administrators of e-journals published using OJS (Open Journals Systems) software. This is something we could do with our own University of Lincoln-published e-journals (Neo and the Occasional Working Papers series) which are hosted on ojs.lincoln.ac.uk
For more of this sort of thing, see the official JournalTOCs blog, their news updates page, and Roddy MacLeod’s blog.
For the sake of completeness, I should also mention the Zetoc RSS feeds service. It’s not quite the same as JournalTOCs, in that these are feeds mediated by the British Library’s TOC service rather than the ‘native’, publishers’ own feeds, but it’s useful for different reasons – and it does cover some of the gaps in JournalTOCs. It’s all RSS, so you can mix and match in your feed reader.
Quarterly reporting with EPrints, RSS, and Google spreadsheets
Posted on April 5th, 2011 by Paul StainthorpSince the beginning of this year, the University of Lincoln has used its Repository as the ‘system of record’ for internal monitoring and reporting on research activity. In particular, Quarterly Research Output Reports are generated, every three months, from the Repo. These reports contain lists of ‘substantive‘ research outputs which first appeared “in published form” (or equivalent for non-textual outputs) during the relevant quarter.
We work one full quarter in hand (to give people plenty of time to deposit/record their publications on the Repository), so we’ve just produced the report for Q4 (October-December) of 2010.
At the moment, the finished reports are treated as confidential: though the information from which they’re automatically generated is freely available on the Repository.
Here’s how we do it:
Step 1. Imagine a Repository search for all items published or in press, from an individual department of the University. It’d look something like this.
Step 2. Export the search as RSS with citations.
Step 3. Next, use Google Docs’ =ImportFeed() function to import the RSS feed into a Google spreadsheet. To save having to edit the [rather long and horrible] formula for each of the University’s 21 departments, and also from having to update it for each quarter, we’ve used cell references within the formula to pick those values up from elsewhere in the spreadsheet. (Those cell references are coloured red and blue in the formula below.)
=ImportFeed(Concatenate("http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/cgi/search/advanced/export_lirolem_AllRSS.rss?screen=Public%3A%3AEPrintSearch&_action_export=1&output=AllRSS&exp=0|1|-date%2Fcreators_name%2Ftitle|archive|-|date%3Adate%3AALL%3AEQ%3A",DATERANGE!A1,"|divisions%3Adivisions%3AALL%3AEQ%3A",A1,"|ispublished%3Aispublished%3AANY%3AEQ%3Apub+inpress|-|eprint_status%3Aeprint_status%3AALL%3AEQ%3Aarchive|metadata_visibility%3Ametadata_visibility%3AALL%3AEX%3Ashow&cache=0"))
We’ve also used a couple | of custom Google scripts to make it easier to look up the reference ID for each department (in the Google spreadsheet it’s the name of each [work]sheet; one sheet per department) and use that value in the EPrints RSS query string.
Step 4. Once all the departmental sheets have been populated with RSS data, export the result to MS Excel, format nicely using Word, “sanity check” with several pairs of human eyes (to pick out the inevitable thing-or-six that the Repository has spat out that makes no sense on the page), and we’re done!
F.A.O. University of Lincoln academic staff: the next Quarterly Research Output Report, covering Q1 (January-March) 2011, will be produced from the Repository on or after the 30th of June 2011.
List of UK public libraries with downloadable e-books (mashup)
Posted on February 21st, 2011 by Paul StainthorpThis week, I spotted that my local public library service (Lincolnshire County Council) have launched an e-books service. Hooray for them – they’ve also recently upgraded all the PCs and introduced wifi in my local branch library.
With many local libraries being cut or placed under threat, and their technological relevance criticised (often ignorantly), even by the PM, it’s great to see investment going in to library technology in Lincolnshire.
The Lincolnshire county libraries e-books site is at: https://lincolnshire.libraryebooks.co.uk/
(It’s not obvious who provides this e-books platform, but it appears Warwickshire County Council—and possibly no-one else—has chosen the same provider.)
It got me wondering: how many UK public libraries currently provide an e-book download service?
To try and find out, I’ve created a (publicly-editable) Google spreadsheet wiki, containing the names of the 232 top-level local authorities in the UK, along with a column indicating whether or not they provide an e-book download service {1|0}, and columns for the URL and provider of that service.
At the time of writing, there are 48 public library e-book download services listed. If I’ve missed one that you know about, you can edit the spreadsheet yourself.
I’ve then used a simple, 4-part Yahoo! Pipe to turn the CSV data output from that spreadsheet into an RSS feed containing only those councils that do provide downloadable e-books.
The finished RSS feed is at: http://bit.ly/e9U2GP
Next, if I can remember my way round the GeoNames/Nearby.org.uk/Google Maps APIs, I’ll have a go at plotting the e-book-providing libraries on a map.
Maths ‘n’ Stats support centre website
Posted on December 7th, 2010 by Paul StainthorpI’ve been working on a little website for the University of Lincoln’s resident statistician, John Flynn, to promote to students (and their lecturers) the services of the Lincoln Maths and Statistics Support Centre.
It’s [yet another] WordPress site on the University’s blogging / self-publishing platform, ‘themed’ with the University’s new-ish CWD (Common Web Design) template.
The support centre itself operates out of the GCW University Library (“Learning Development” suite) three days a week, and helps students with assessment worries and analysis for project work. Related: sigma – Centre for Excellence in Mathematics & Statistics Support.
The website is at: http://mathsandstats.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/
I’ve also added a widget to the Library ‘tab’ on Blackboard, which displays links to the [currently] 4 pages on the Maths and Stats website. This I created using the site’s RSS feed (it has the WordPress ‘RSS Include Pages‘ plugin activated) – fed through Feed2JS to turn it into JavaScript-within-HTML tags – then embedded within a Blackboard HTML widget. Easy peasy.
Spot the difference: RSP event in Sheffield
Posted on November 15th, 2010 by Paul Stainthorp
The entire e-resources and repository team went en masse to the latest Repositories Support Project event, “Doing it differently“, which was held in Sheffield Cathedral on the 27th of October 2010: “to hear about alternative approaches to repository-like functions, open access and the general field of improving research communications“.
Some quick points from the notes I took on the day:
- [I think it was] Stephanie Taylor of UKOLN [who] made a good point in her presentation about the ‘forgotten’ people in libraries, who ought naturally to be interested in the content held in repositories, but who are rarely included in discussions: inter-library loans staff being an obvious example, with the repo. as source of material to reduce the burden on document supply.
- Our own repository was mentioned in Richard Davis (ULCC)’s examples of SNEEP plugins used ‘in the wild’ – it’s good to think that some of the features of the Lincoln Repository (crafted over in the LIROLEM project that gave it its genesis) are still worthy of being held up as examples.
- Stephanie Meece’s demo of the University of the Arts’ repository was enlightening; it gave considered and coherent explanation of some of the low-level culture-clash conversations that we’ve had with our own Art & Design academic staff. It was worth it, too, to hear about the Kultur Consortium and the potential there for mutual support and development of repositories capable of meeting the needs of the Arts.
- Joss Winn was also there, bringing the University of Lincoln contingent to five! Joss gave a talk on using RSS to grease the wheels of scholarly writing and publishing, which has an accompanying blog post.
- Also exciting to see the direction Mendeley is taking [slides], with the potential (in the new year) for new features (“Library Groups”) to support library e-journals admininstration and subscription analysis.
We also took the opportunity (as four of the five committee members were in the room) to conduct an informal, stand-up UKCoRR meeting over lunch, at which we laid the groundwork for the next UKCoRR AGM, which will hopefully take place toward the end of February 2011.
Slides and handouts from the day are on the RSP’s website.
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This blog by Paul Stainthorp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.