How to: know when your organization appears in the news
I’ve found that a number of hospital employees have current awareness needs that aren’t clinical. Sure, you can set up alerts from ProQuest or EBSCO from non-clinical periodicals, but if what your users want is to know when your organization appears in the news, I’ve found the following pretty effective and completely free.
There are a number of search engines for news that can output feeds. Although I’ve usually been partial to Google News and Topix, but MSN and Yahoo have similar services, and it seems silly to leave them out, but it is a pain in the backside to find each site, run the search, and collect the feed URL. Fortunately, we have feedgit.
Feedgit us a sort of metasearch (or federated search) for all kinds of searches where the search results can be outputted as feeds.
First, go to http://www.feedgit.com
Next, enter your search terms. Since I’m looking for news about Community General Hospital in Syracuse, my search string will be: “Community General Hospital” Syracuse
…now click the Search button.
Underneath the search field is a short list of popular aggregators. If you use one of these, go ahead and click the appropriate one (I use Bloglines). If ou don’t use one of these, click the orange, square RSS icon on the far right.
Now there should be a button next to each source of news information to be searched according to my string, allowing me to add the new feed to my aggregator with a single click!
To help demonstrate the usefulness of your library to management who don’t often have need for the clinical information you regularly provide, try making these feeds available via aggregator or email (try RSSFWD or FeedBurner) to the Director of Corporate Communications, PR Director, or other management who care a whole lot about public perception.
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September 20th, 2006 at 10:11 am
Clipping Service on the Cheap
This may be of benefit to, primarily, special librarians, but it’s worth a thought for any librarian wishing to make a positive impression on whatever group or person is responsible for funding… David Rothman, in his blog focusing on medical…
September 28th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
David thank you for the article on feedgit. We hope ifeedgit helps many people stay informed on their interests.
Feedgit is made by inclue! http://www.inclue.com makes a media inbox that works with outlook and outlook express. inclue! is an RSS webfeed reader that is free. It is a powerful addition with feedgit and supports podcasts and video casts. Hope it is useful for you and your audience.
Nick Gogerty
CEO inclue!
May 18th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
[...] Okay, Feedgit is a good way of quickly creating search-based feeds from news sources. But if you really want to catch online mentions of a particular topic from a whole ton of sources, check out MonitorThis. With MonitorThis you can subscribe to 22 different search engine feeds at the same time. Enter a search term and click the ‘make monitor.opml’ button to get a list of rss feeds in OPML format. [...]
May 18th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
[...] How to know when your library is in the news Published May 18th, 2007 RSS David Rothman talks about some applications that give us a sort of metasearch (or federated search) for all kinds of searches where the search results can be outputted as feeds. Whew! I guess that means these applications can collect the results of your search from several different search engines. Read his post from his blog here, http://davidrothman.net/2006/09/18/how-to-know-when-your-organization-appears-in-the-news/ . [...]