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Download Tutorial |  |
Watch Video | RSS Feeds & Email Alerts for Research |
| About This Tutorial | |
| This tutorial will teach you how to idetify and use RSS Feeds and E-Mail Alerts to automatically get up-to-date results from your database searches. Use the links below to jump to a specific section or simply read along. What are RSS Feeds and E-Mail Alerts? (with Video) Why should I use RSS Feeds or E-Mail Alerts? How do I identify RSS Feeds? What are popular RSS Feed Readers/Aggregators? How do I subscribe to an RSS Feed or set-up an E-Mail Alert? How do I find a specific RSS Feed or E-Mail Alert? What is better to use - an RSS Feed or an E-Mail Alert? Prepared by Stan Bogdanov, 02/2011 - 516.877.3553 / sbogdanov@adelphi.edu |
| What are popular RSS Feed Readers/Aggregators? | |
| There are many different RSS Aggregators on the Web. Some are geared towards video feeds, some audio feeds, etc. Even though Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox offer RSS Reading capabilities, they are not the perfect solution if you want your feeds to be accessible anywhere. Since one cannot access personal bookmarks from everywhere many people choose to subscribe to a (free) online RSS Aggregator or download a program. This will allow you to access your RSS Feeds from any computer. The following aggregators are the most widely used and most popular in their fields:
Web-based Aggregators - Bloglines or Google Reader for the people who already use GMail or other Google Services. Mac OSX - NetNewsWire Windows - FeedDemon Linux - Liferea |
| How do I subscribe to an RSS Feed or set-up an E-Mail Alert? | |||||||||||||
| RSS Feeds can be read/accessed using a program called an RSS Aggregator or RSS Reader (some aggregators are listed here). Because these programs may vary, there isn't a unified way to subscribe/access an RSS Feed.
However, when accessing Adelphi's research databases, there are a few steps that will be the same most of the time. For a detailed example, please click here.
There is no general way to subscribe to an E-Mail Alert. Most vendors would require you to first create a free account and then give you the option to create an "alert" once you do a search. Once you get your search results, there would usually be a link on the top of the page for creating the email alert. Upon clicking it, you would be brought to a page where you can enter your personal information and details on the delivery method and timing. Link text varies from "alert" to "notify" to "email". For a more detailed example, click here. Following are links to the RSS Feeds and E-Mail Alerts Tutorials offered by some of Adelphi's Database Providers. Click on the name of the Database Provider to access it.
One provider usually offers several databases, but the guidelines for setting up RSS Feeds or E-mail Alerts are the same for each. To access the RSS Feeds tutorials for the provider you have
chosen, click on the RSS button. To access the E-mail Alerts tutorial, click on the envelope button. You can access the database providers
both from the links posted here and from the A-Z List of Databases.
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| How do I find a specific RSS Feed or E-Mail Alert? | |
| If you are trying to locate the RSS Feed for a particular vendor/database/journal, you have two options:
First - access the database from our A to Z List of Databases and look for the familiar RSS icons. Or second - use a search engine that looks for RSS Feeds. You can use the following links to search - just substitute the word "database" in the search bar with your own search query: Bing RSS Feed Search Unfortunately there is no particular way to locate a specific e-mail alert since it is all custom-generated. You can visit the vendor's website and, after performing a search, look for an "alert" link to set one up. |
Contact
For additional information, please contact:
Adelphi University Library
Reference Desk
Adelphi University
P.O. Box 701
Garden City, NY 11530-0701
p - 516.877.3574
e - ReferenceServices@adelphi.edu
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