On January 7, 2009 I took a revamped version of my “Introduction to RefWorks” presentation to a group of doctoral students in the iSchool. This is similar to the classes that I give each semester as a RefWorks instructor for Syracuse University Library.

Since many of them are distance students (and, additionally, the weather was truly vile that day), the class was only attended in person by one student. The intention of the instructor, Angela Ramnarine-Rieks, was that we make a video of the instruction session that would be distributed via the university’s Ensemble video server and that the students could review it at any time as they began their research.

(WMV 01:13:27)

Although I targeted my selection of search examples to my intended audience of iSchool doctoral candidates, I think the video does a pretty good job covering all the basics of getting started in using RefWorks. Because I knew I was doing a video, that could be paused and rewound, I gave the presentation at a brisk pace, although I tried to pause at obvious stopping points where the viewer might try out what I had been demonstrating.

My PowerPoint slide pack is published on SlideShare. In addition, I formatted the slides, together with my speaking notes, as 77 page PDF handout and reformatted for printing double-sided as a 40 page (20 physical sheets) PDF booklet.

In the class, I handed out the library’s “Introducing RefWorks” short guide as well as a list of tips for exporting citations to RefWorks from some select information science databases and Google Scholar, and the library’s OPAC. I provided links to the more in-depth “Quick Start Guide” that RefWorks publishes and the library’s RefWork Help page.

Feedburner is a tool to optimize feeds so it is a perfect tool to use to make our Pipes feed more robust. It does this by letting you assign your own name to the feed, but also by styling the feed for display in web browsers, making it easily consumed by just about any feed reader, and providing an array of subscription management and monitoring options.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/sul/chempubs

Display Using SpringWidget

SpringWidget is a partner with Feedburner, so it is a simple matter to generate a display widget. You have options of embedding the widget in your site directly as a Flash widget or you can do it via javascript. There’s no difference in how it displays but, if you use the latter method, it won’t display if javascript is disabled in your browser (nor with the other two widgets we’ve already seen). As such, it is the most robust solution of the three options and it is probably the aesthetically most interesting one as well.

Format of the items is pretty similar to how Pipes was handling them, the only addition being the inclusion of each item’s pubDate (basically the date it was indexed in Scopus).

A version of this last widget, formatted a little differently, can be found on my Chemistry Resources page. That widget is further enhanced in that it also includes subscription by email and an RSS subscription chicklet, both from FeedBurner.

Yahoo Pipes is, as the site says, “is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” It uses the idea from Unix of “piping” a series of commands together in a sequence — passing the results from one command to use as the input for the next — but does so using an intuitive graphical user interface. I’ve used Pipes to reformat the feed and remove a few unnecessary branding elements from Scopus. My main objectives were to make the description look more like a citation (albeit incomplete) and to edit the links to Scopus so that they send the user through EZproxy for off-campus access.

The links are no longer IP address dependent, but they are specific to the institution hosting EZproxy. The first link below goes to the Pipes page for the feed I created where I can preview the results of my changes. The second link is to the feed itself.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=gket7SkL3RGuUHXSy6ky6g

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=gket7SkL3RGuUHXSy6ky6g&_render=rss

Display Using Pipes Badge

Pipes has something called a “badge” which lets you embed your feed into a webpage using javascript. It is just a matter of copying the script into your own webpage. The display presents items as a striped list. Titles are linked to the proxied url for the corresponding complete record in Scopus and the item description below that is presented in the citation-like format we applied to it in Pipes.

However, I have to say that my experience with Pipes is that they can be a little fragile in display mode and not all RSS feed readers do a good job with them. Plus, the url that Pipes uses is no improvement over the one generated directly by Scopus.

Scopus

As I mentioned in my UNYSL talk last week, I am repurposing a search that I ran in Scopus, Elsevier’s science citation database, to generate a list of newly published articles by chemistry researchers at Syracuse University. Scopus offers a custom RSS alert option for every search you perform. I won’t repeat the steps I had to make to get it to work well — see the slides for that.

Here is the url for the RSS feed from Scopus for the faculty publication search. The url is ugly but functional and it reliably brings in the results I designed it for. As is, it can be sent to just about any RSS feed reader without any problem.

http://syndic8.scopus.com/getMessage?registrationId=EAHEFDPEFCHMMBLJGAHMFAHHFAIFIEKMGSJSTEHLIT

However, what I want to do is figure out a way to display it directly on my web site. It really isn’t difficult to display RSS feeds directly on a webpage. However, unless you are running your own server-side program, you will probably use some sort of third-party widget that you can embed on your page. Widgets of this sort use javascript or Flash or some combination of the two. You embed code stating the location of the widget and then tell the widget which RSS feed it should use, and it does the rest.

Display Using Grazr

Grazr is one of the first widgets that I used when I was first playing around with embedding RSS feeds on web pages. It is quite easy to use and configure. It is embedded using javascript and pulls a page generated by Grazr into an iframe on your own web page. It has been stable and reliable over the past several years.

Shown below, the Grazr widget displays the titles of articles from the Scopus field in a list. Clicking the title expands it to show the description for each article: author, journal title, year, and date the record was indexed in Scopus. Clicking the icon to the right of the article title takes you to the corresponding record in Scopus. Links are not proxied, so access to Scopus (a subscription database) is IP address dependent.

• Yahoo Pipes – to modify the presentation of items in the feed so that they look more like article citations; to remove some administrative links that Scopus includes by default; and to add an EZproxy prefix to the link urls.
• FeedBurner – to create a more human-readable feed url than either of the hash-based urls that both Scopus and Pipes generate; to add in click-through tracking and feed subscription options; and to optimize the feed for presentation in a browser and for consumption by feed reader software.

My example in the presentation is, more-or-less, the “New Faculty Publications” widget that I’m using on my Chemistry Resources page. That widget is further enhanced from what I’ll be showing in this afternoon’s talk in that it also includes subscription by email and an RSS subscription chicklet, both from FeedBurner.

I’m making my presentation slides and notes available at SlideShare (download or see below) and I’m also sharing the 2-page PDF of my talk overview handout.

Stay tuned.

I’m trying out John Miedema’s OpenBook Book Data plugin for Wordpress using http://openlibrary.org/b/OL3674962M as my sample record.

It is pretty simple: just put the ISBN of the book inside [openbook] tags and the plugin does the rest. E.G.,

[openbook]1931561648[/openbook]

Thanks, John, for all you’ve done to get it to work on PHP installations less than 5.2.

Addendum: I can mention it now (it was still pre-pub when I first wrote this), but John authored an excellent article, “OpenBook WordPress Plugin: Open Source Access to Bibliographic Data“, that was published in the latest issue of Code4Lib Journal.