engineering trade information metadata in RSS
EEVL helped three engineering publishers to develop RSS news feeds and wrote a useful guide for publishers to get them started using RSS.
Summary
The information needs of engineers extend beyond the scholarly peer reviewed literature. Trade information like industry, product, and market news is important but ephemeral and rarely aggregated. In 2003, EEVL was JISC’s portal for Engineering, Mathematics, and Computing and saw an opportunity to use the RSS news feed standard to solve this problem. If publishers of engineering trade information could be encouraged to use RSS, portals like EEVL could aggregate the feeds and include them its services. Users would find it easier to discover trade information, and the publishers would reach a wider audience.
EEVL collaborated on this project with three engineering publishers – Pro-Talk, a publisher of technical and professional websites and newsletters; Centaur Communications, a publisher of leading trade publications, and Jobsite, a leading Internet recruitment service. EEVL worked with them to identify suitable content, helped them create the news feeds to the RSS standard, and then aggregated the feeds. Each of the publishers wrote up their experiences of implementing the news feeds as a case study.
The project resulted in two important deliverables – guidelines for creating RSS feeds and an interoperability demonstrator. RSS: A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers (PDF) explains RSS in non-technical language so publishers can get started using it easily. The demonstrator shows how RSS feeds from different sources can be aggregated.
The project demonstrated that it’s easy for a publisher to implement RSS news feeds and gave insights into the practical benefits. RSS gets news to a target audience quickly and draws them to the publisher’s web site to find out more. It also demonstrated the potential of aggregating news, making it easy for users to get news from multiple sources in a single feed. This led to the launch of EEVL’s OneStep news services (see Outcomes below). The Primer was highly praised and is still useful.
Outcomes
This project had some very practical outcomes. Building on the project experience, EEVL launched two free services based on aggregated news feeds, now part of TechXtra – OneStep Industry News and OneStep Jobs. Aimed at students and staff in Higher and Further Education, these services bring together in one place the latest industry news and job announcements from top sources, and provide an easy way to monitor a range of useful content with minimum effort. Users can follow direct links to the complete full text on the publishers' own web sites. OneStep Job News includes jobs from 30 sources.
The publishers that participated in the project are still using RSS and their news feeds are included in the OneStop news services. How to put RSS Feeds from Pro-Talk on to your Website lists the Pro-Talk RSS feeds and explains how aggregators can use them. This illustrates how Pro-Talk is using aggregators to reach a wider audience with their news.
Outputs
There are links to all the project outputs listed below from the EEVL project website.
Guidelines
RSS: A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers (PDF) is a useful practical guide to RSS. It is aimed at a non-technical audience who want an overview of RSS so they can decide whether and how to use the technology to support their business. It explains the concepts, gives examples, and provides links to other useful resources. It was highly praised when it was launched in 2003 and is still a useful guide.
Demonstrator
The project created a simple RSS aggregator to demonstrate the potential of aggregating news feeds from different sources. Click on a source to view the aggregated news items, or cross search all the sources by keyword.
Case Studies
Each of the three participating publishers prepared a case study documenting their experience using RSS:
The case studies explain how they used RSS, how they view the benefits, and their plans for using it in the future. The project also provided sample RSS feeds from each of the publishers.
Reports
The project’s short final report (PDF) to JISC reports on the project experience, what was achieved, and issues beyond its scope that may merit future work.
Publications
- Roddy MacLeod, RSS and EEVL: Syndicating industry news and job announcements, Ariadne, October 2003, Issue 37, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/eevl/
- R A MacLeod, RSS: Less Hype, More Action, Free Pint, June 2004, Issue 161 http://www.freepint.com/issues/170604.htm
Presentations
Further Information