Transfusion Reading List

Data­bases like PubMed and Turn­ing Research Into Prac­tice (TRIP), and even the occa­sional transfusion-related web­site are begin­ning to offer RSS feeds. RSS feeds present online infor­ma­tion in ways that help you mon­i­tor new pub­li­ca­tions and upcom­ing events. This demo of excep­tional feeds shows you how you can make best use of these tools. It will be of spe­cial inter­est to indi­vid­u­als who want to mon­i­tor the lit­er­a­ture, edu­ca­tors who want to cre­ate read­ing lists for their stu­dents and orga­ni­za­tions who would like to syn­di­cate their resources. The demo will get bet­ter over time as more web­sites make feeds avail­able to their visitors.

What’s here?

• The demo
• Down­loads
• FAQs
• Con­trib­u­tors

Trans­fu­sion Read­ing List Demo

Need help? See How to use this demo.

Down­loads

Here are two resources to help you design your own read­ing list. The first is an XML file of the cur­rent list, which you can then mod­ify to suite your own needs. The sec­ond is a poster abstract I pre­sented at the CSTM 2009 con­fer­ence that describes how one goes about design­ing a read­ing list.

Down­load: Trans­fu­sion Read­ing List XML
Updated: Octo­ber 21st, 2009
Instruc­tions: 1) Click and save file to your hard drive; 2) Import into your own feed reader; 3) Mod­ify, add and delete feeds; 4) Share your feeds with your trans­fu­sion community.

Down­load: Cre­ate a Trans­fu­sion Read­ing List With Web Feeds poster abstract
Size: 13.09 MB

Fre­quently Asked Questions

If your answer is not here, post a com­ment or con­tact me at shanta.rohse@gmail.com

1. How do I use the demo? Try the Demo Help.
2. Will RSS feeds let me get arti­cles for free? Only if they are free to begin with.
3. I already use email alerts. Why would I use RSS feeds?. If they serve you well, email alerts are use­ful (Dr. Jen­nifer Fesser rec­om­mends Pub­Crawler). If you find they are buried under a del­uge of other emails or you want to be able to refine, fil­ter or oth­er­wise fil­ter infor­ma­tion, con­sider try­ing feeds. They are also more eas­ily exchanged with your colleagues.
4. Are there dis­ad­van­tages to using RSS feeds? Not all web sites offer them (for­tu­nately, this is chang­ing), you need to use a feed reader to view the feeds (much like you need an email client to view your emails), and you need to remem­ber to look at your feed reader.
5. How do I sub­scribe to feed? To fol­low an RSS feed, you need a feed reader. I pre­fer Google Reader, a web-based feed reader, but there are many other good choices.
6. How do I find RSS feeds? Look for the image icons or or on your favourite transfusion-related web pages. Look for RSS options within arti­cle data­bases like PubMed or TRIP. Or use a direc­tory like Google’s Blogsearch or this demo.
7. May I copy your feeds into my feed reader/organizational web site/learning man­age­ment sys­tem? Yes.
8. My orga­ni­za­tion wants to syn­di­cate our resources using RSS feeds. What should we do? Excel­lent deci­sion! Con­tact your web designer. Good web design­ers have many tools at their dis­posal for adding RSS feeds to your site.
9. How do I know when you’ve added a new feed to your demo? Sub­scribe to the feed for this post: RSS feed for this post. Well, of course you expected me to pro­vide a feed. See how this works?

Con­trib­u­tors

The Trans­fu­sion Read­ing List began dur­ing a work­shop called Cool Tools: Web-based learn­ing for Trans­fu­sion Spe­cial­ists, orig­i­nally held for the Ontario Regional Blood Coor­di­nat­ing Net­work (ORB­CoN). The work­shop has been held a num­ber of times, and indi­vid­u­als have con­tributed their finely crafted search queries, includ­ing these par­tic­i­pants who wanted to share their exper­tise and make this read­ing list an out­stand­ing resource for the trans­fu­sion infor­ma­tion maven: Dr. Jen­nifer Fesser, Dr. Heather Hume, The CBS TRALI Work­ing Group, Pat Letendre, Dr. Jeanne Cal­lum, Ray Berger, Dr. Ben Saxon, Wendy Owens, Diana Boye.