Staying informed without the mess

Keeping up on your reading can be hard, even for a librarian. Don’t despair. There are tools to help.

RSS feeds are a great way to stay informed about what’s being published in your areas of interest. You can subscribe to feeds from your favorite blogs or create feeds for valuable database searches. However, feeding publication alerts into your email may result in their eventual burial. You think you’ll read it later, but the queue grows longer and the article is forgotten.

A feed aggregator, such as Bloglines, serves as a kind of warehouse where you can store literature for later reading. And as a web-based aggregator, Bloglines is accessible from any computer with Internet access.

Want to try? Go to http://www.bloglines.com/, enter your email address, and create a password. That’s it, you’re ready to go. Now all you need to do is keep an eye out for subscription opportunities, often indicated by this orange icon. Here are two examples of how to begin subscribing.

Subscribing to a blog:

• Click the orange icon
• Select your feed reader of choice (i.e. Bloglines)
• Click subscribe now
• You will be directed to your Bloglines account
• Create and name a new Bloglines folder
• Set your display options

Subscribing to a database search:

• Create the search
• Click the orange icon
• Copy the new feed’s URL
• Go to your Bloglines account
• Choose to add a new feed
• Paste the feed URL into the box provided
• Click subscribe
• Create and name a new Bloglines folder
• Set your display options

It’s that easy. Start collecting multiple feeds in one convenient location. You’ll stay informed and your email will be less cluttered.