If you haven't done so, please read the article entitled "A Virtual Reading Room Coming to Your Desktop."  This piece reviews the benefits of making use of RSS feeds.  For any user to have to go from bookmarked site to bookmarked site trying to stay current in your fields of interest is a major sinkhole for your time.  You have to go to the site and pull the information.  RSS feeds push this information to you as soon as it is posted.  It is a much better use of your time to be able to go to one spot where notification of any new added material is sent directly to you.

I have encouraged you (COB faculty) to set up such an RSS feed from my library news page (known as a blog) because this is replacing my monthly print newsletters announcing new materials added to our collection.  The question becomes:  how do I do this?

At the bottom of the news/blog page, you will see the RSS icon.  Click on this icon, and you are taken to the "subscribe page."  The easiest channel to set up is to simply choose "Microsoft Office Outlook" since it is the default campus email system (as shown below).  

When you click on "Subscribe Now," you will be immediately taken to your Outlook email. 

Looking on the left-hand side of the Outlook screen, you see "All Mail Folders."  Towards the bottom of the folder list is that same RSS icon.  Under that folder is a subset set of folders, one being "rosenberger's blog."  Outlook always tells you how many new emails you have in the folder so it will be easy for you to just glance down looking for any new postings. 

Another way to collect your various RSS feeds is to use Google Reader.  In order to do this, though, you must first set up a Google email account, known as Gmail.  By establishing a reader account, all you have to do is go to that one site and read the day's additions to all your various sites of interest, whether they are something like WSJ.com, or Fast Company, or RealClearPolitics, or any of your favorite journals, like Journal of Business Ethics. 

This piece is not about touting the benefits of Gmail, as I am sure you are already aware of some of its very nice features.  But I do want to make the case that setting up this "reader" account is not the only benefit you can derive from having a Gmail account.  The main purpose here is to encourage you to make your life simpler.  We all need to stay current with our reading, thus making RSS feeds are THE way to go!