Using Technology to Keep Track of "Hot Topics"

By Brenda Mahoney, Learning Resource Centre

For your course work or for your own interest, it is always good to stay current. Technology provides you with many wonderful, easy-to-use tools that can make information gathering less of a chore.

In the last issue of the Learning and Teaching newsletter, “Technology Tips" covered the use of alerts within databases as a great time saver for staying up-to-date with specific research topics. Alerts permit you to set up a search profile that directs the database to automatically repeat this search periodically (e.g. once a day or once a month) and send you the search results. Staying on top of new literature related to your topic has never been easier!

Many newspaper web sites offer alerts as well. These alerts, however, often require the user to subscribe for additional services on the newspaper's website that are not always free. For example, The Globe and Mail's (www.globeanddmail.com) alert service, called GlobeEdge, is part of a paid “Insider Subscription" Edition.

Search engines also provide alert services. A Beta test of the new Google Alerts service is available at www.google.ca/alerts . The service is currently free and permits you to monitor the news and the web. They provide email updates of Google results that relate to the query you defined for your alert.

On the web, there are many sites that monitor the web for you. My favourite sites include: the Librarian's Index to the Internet at lii.org (New sites are easily found in a side bar), and Gary Price's www.resourceshelf.com. As a generalist Librarian, these sites feature help me to keep up with the variety of web material that I need. There are many of these services available on the web. Choose your sites carefully. Monitor your choices and eliminate ones that do not offer you what you need since too many sources will overwhelm you.

To make it even easier, these index sites generally offer other means, aside from a daily visit, to keep you up-to-date. These include the e-mail newsletter, Blogs (or weblogs) and the new exciting technology of RSS feeds. The Librarian's Index to the Internet offers RSS feeds and describes them as “a popular way to track key--and free!-- content from newsy sites, such as newspaper headlines, your favourite blogs, and LII New This Week, without filling up your e-mail box or tying a string around your finger to check various Web sites. Thousands if not millions of RSS feeds are now available." A free aggregator to read RSS feeds can be found at www.bloglines.com.

For more information about RSS and how to stay current with the web, read this great article by Rita Vine of Workingfaster.com on the new technologies available entitled Keeping up to Date in Web Search: Refine Your Skills in a Changing World. It is available at www.workingfaster.com/uptodate_infooutlook2004.pdf

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