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Tuesday April 19th – RSS Feeds (from GPO)/GPO Bookstore

To provide your own take on the RSS Feeds/GPO Bookstore Session, please either comment below or send your notes and/or multimedia to dnlcornwall@alaska.net. Please let FGI know if we can use your name and affiliation.


The following notes were contributed by Sharon M. Partridge of the Jefferson County Public Library in Lakewood CO. Any hyperlinks were added by FGI staff.

All interpretations of documents and comments made are my own and do not reflect on my institution. These were typed on the day noted and subsequent days may have changed things. All mistakes are mine and feel free to post corrections.

RSS feed allows subscribers to a feed to get content as subscribers to a list-serv get email. It’s easy to subscribe and unsubscribe and you can use different RSS readers as you can use different web browsers. Some are free and some aren’t. We saw some GPO files seen through the different readers and they do look different. Lisa LaPlant, the presenter, said this is a personal preference as is choosing a search engine. Google has some RSS readers available for download but you don’t have to have it on your desktop. It allows you to get updated information. For example your reader might search a news outlet for new content every half hour, if you were waiting for a news story. It would pop up on your screen if there had been a change. You can also customize this by subject. Alternatively, you can choose to have information automatically sent to you. This could include catalog records for lost docs, New Electronic Lists, or announcements from GPO.

Nathaniel showed us the new look and new functionality of the GPO Bookstore site. It is much more like Amazon or other bookstores but has the flavor of GPO so that you know you are getting government information. The search mode is MUCH better. When you search for a title you actually will have the title within the first 10 results. A search on Statistical Abstracts of the United States 2004 actually gave us the first title as Stat Abs 2004 (after a couple variations in the search)! The next five titles were other Stat Abs titles! The title includes a short annotation and clicking on the title gives you the catalog record. There is a browse topics list and a button to sign up for the topic alerts. There are tabs to best sellers and other categories. If you browse topics and are looking at the Fs, when you click on best sellers tab you get a list that begins with F.

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