Effectively Managing Your Information

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Effectively Managing Your Information Research

• Stephen Meyer
• NCSU Libraries Fellow

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Graduate studies and information

• Conducting original research requires extensive
  literature reviews
• Disparate sources of information
• Research reports online
• Journal articles
• Data sets (personal and collected from outside
  sources)
• The current information world is very fluid

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A Small Sample of Information Sources
Communication w/ colleagues
Email listservs
Articlecollections
Database alerts
Online searches
Library searches
???
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Filtering Information

• Staying current
• Not forgetting it

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Part I(staying current)
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Alerts

• Traditional automated method for
• staying current with a research topic

Research database Stores your queries on a topic
New content added to database If any new
articles match the topic saved in your query, the
results are emailed to you.
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Alerts Demo

• http//www.lib.ncsu.edu/

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My Alert Results
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My Alert Results (contd)
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Alerts drawbacks

• Need an account for each database
• Crafting a good alert query takes time
• Research evolves your alert queries will need
  to change as your topic changes

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RSS

• Really Simple Syndication
• Rich Site Summary
• (doesnt really matter)

OR
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More RSS details(somewhat important)

• Specifies various XML file formats
• Commonly used for weblogs and news sites
• Commonly identified on websites by
• Has sibling formats like ATOM

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What does RSS do?(very important)

• Provide a means by which content from one source
  can be syndicated in another location by a
  computer.

How?
By utilizing XML as a data exchange format for
the web
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• The most common use of RSS feeds is
  incorporation into web sites...

Content Syndication with RSS By
Ben Hammersley ...................................
............ Publisher O'Reilly Pub Date March
2003 ISBN 0-596-00383-8
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RSS-based Websites

• BLOGS

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What is a blog?

• Short for weblog
• Originally intended to serve as a link log(quite
  literally a log of ones surfing activities on the
  web by means of storing links)
• A very simple content publishing system for the
  webOnce software is installed requires minimal
  knowledge of HTML to publish online
• Enables very fast publication through a method
  known as posting

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Web-based Blogging Software
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What is a blog? (online publishing as simple as
email)

• A way for family members to bring shame upon your
  home
• The last resort of bad authors everywhere to
  engage in the most dreary vanity publishing
  imaginable publicly accessible journaling
• A way for undeserving, wannabe journalists to get
  press passes to national party conventions

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Blog Examples(and blog-like examples)

• Organizations, companies
• NC State
• NCSU Libraries
• W3C
• Google

Magazines Journals, Newspapers Wired Scientific
American News Observer NY Times
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News Readers

• Also known as aggregators
• Email-like applications that bring together all
  of the RSS feeds a person may be monitoring
• May have extra organizational features such as
  subject base categories of feeds

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News Readers (contd)
For more information see NC States RSS page
http//www.ncsu.edu/rss.html
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Scholarly Use of RSS

• Scholarly databases are beginning to incorporate
  RSS functionality to their traditional alert
  services

Compendex
PubMed
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RSS Demo

• http//www.lib.ncsu.edu/

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The Good, The Bad The RSS

• Pros
• Centralization
• Bring together feeds from multiple databases to a
  single aggregator

• Cons
• RSS is a new technology
• Yet another program to learn
• Standards best practices are still being worked
  out
• Have not reached widespread adoption

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Part II(keeping it organized)
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Organizing Citations

• Collect citations for journal articles, books,
  and other sources
• Create bibliographies in a variety of styles
• Export citations with style formatting (e.g., to
  MS Word)

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Free RefWorks Accounts
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(No Transcript)
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(Your Research Inputs)
(Your Research Output)
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Thank you.

• stephen_meyer_at_ncsu.edu