A Virtual Reading Room Coming to a Desktop Near You!

Thursday, May 28, 2009 / 11:15 AM

By: Romine (Connie) Rosenberger

Are you old enough to have experienced the pleasure and sheer delight of sinking into a well worn chair in a current periodicals section, having gathered your "must read" journals for the month?  Alas, this scenario depicts a fast fleeting ritual that was once a part of every academic's life.  Current awareness in our respective fields keeps us fresh, on our toes, and alert to possible new ideas for research.

With the advent of a world online, keeping current with our professional reading has become much easier, even though we still have to remember to check the online journal from time to time for updates.  Thanks to technology, staying current has made a huge step forward-content can be pushed directly to your desktop as soon as it is published online.  RSS, a web tool used to notify subscribers of updated or new content, is rapidly being adopted by database vendors and some academic journal databases as well as some individual publishers.  Some of you have taken advantage of options to alert you when any new article appears in a database that matches your saved search strategy.  Now, this concept has been broadened to alert you when a new issue of your favorite journal or journals is published.  RSS feeds can now be set up for most journals.

If you already use RSS feeds, it will be a simple matter for you to locate the URL for your favorite journals and paste them into the RSS tool.  However, if you are not familiar with RSS, there are services available (Yahoo!Pipes, Google Reader) that can assist you in collecting selected feeds into one conduit that will "push" this information to you as new material comes available.

Another idea that might appeal to you and your department would be to collectively identify those journals that all in your discipline should read regularly.  Your liaison could assist you in establishing a virtual reading room for your department.

Staying current has never been easier.  We hope you will avail yourselves of this opportunity.  If you need assistance, please call your library liaison.

(Based on an article in the December 2008 issue of College & Research Libraries News, "Developing Current Awareness Services".)