In a couple of recent posts (here and here) I've posted how the OU Library has started getting into the habit of producing RSS feeds (yippee!:-)
These can readily be integrated into an official or ad hoc MyOpenLibrary page.
One question that just came to mind is this: how about being able to consume Library feeds from within Connotea.
As you probably know, Connotea is promoting itself as "a free online reference management service for scientists", but it is also admirably suited to providing an educational social bookmarking service, for HE (undergraduate, as well as postgraduate, Higher Education) at least.
One thing that prompted the integration thought is that Connotea already allows users to enter their academic library's OpenURL resolver information to allow for easy access to online academic content that the user's host library subscribes to.
By integrating a user's home library's alerts services (such as new books, and current loans information*) into Connotea, it will be one more stop towards a unified academic reference management tool.
*perhaps seemlessly bookmarking the latter as new books are borrowed, and highlighting the former as possibly worth a browse?
Hmm - I wonder whether Conntoea should be offering a MyOpenLibrary like interface too..?
PS I believe that the OU has just moved away from Athens authentication to letting users who have been authenticated by the OU's single authentication system gain access to Library mediated third party services. This should make accessing electronic resources via bookmarks easier (if the OU authentication cookie is set, of course!), and means there is no need for Athens toolbar like services in any future OU Library toolbar (official one coming soon???).
PPS More and more eJournals offefr an RSS feed of contents for latest journal issues - for example, I subscribe to this one from Dlib. It might be quite useful if I could subscribe to such feeds in Connotea, and copy references to my connotea library from the RSS feed, in much the same way that I can copy other uses' references.
Posted by ajh59 at November 14, 2005 09:43 PM