RSS Feed Generator for Academic Journals

Robert K. Nelson has created a very cool RSS Feed Generator for either articles or reviews for journals available through Project Muse and History Cooperative. His project takes its inspiration from William Turkel’s “How to: See the Field at a Glance” which uses a scraper to extract tables of contents and other useful data from online journals.

There is some some great stuff in these posts that outline some creative ways to re-image how to keep up with current scholarship in the field as well as thinking about searching the web in new and imaginative ways. I saw this resource a little while back and have been meaning to blog it because I think it is a superb example of just how valuable RSS is to academics who need to stay on top of what’s been published recently in their field.

I have subscribed to a few feeds in the field of Early American Literature, and interestingly enough I came across some scholarship being done by a professor here at UMW. How else would I know that Carter Hudgins recently published an article in the William & Mary Quarterly titled “Adaptation and Innovation: Archaeological and Architectural Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake”? Immediate dividends!

It should be noted that Robert’s Feed generator is designed primarily for journals dealings with US History and the Early Republic. Additionally, not all online journals can be scraped equally. Nonetheless, there is no reason why discipline specific instructional technologists couldn’t trace the resource Robert points to in order to see how many other journals fro a wider range of journals could be scraped and aggregated for their faculty. It would certainly make the conversation about the uses of RSS and Aggregation that much more compelling.