OK idea for ProQuest to offer an RSS feed for dissertations and theses in seven subject areas, but my campus runs everyone (even on-campus users) through EZProxy before accessing this database, so even on campus when I click a link in the resulting feed I can’t get to the actual content. I need a way to include my EZProxy prefix in this feed for it to be useful to me, and of course my distance students would find the same thing. I also need to be able to get feeds for searches I have saved myself, not just in broad subject areas. A good start though!
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4 Responses to “ProQuest Dissertations and Theses RSS Feed”
I ran into the same problem when talking about the idea of incorporating RSS feeds of journal tables of contents into web pages. For open access titles there is no problem, but for a closed title, you need to have the links formatted with your own proxy information. Or use a feed display system that strips the html out of the feed and provide a separate title link–which is what I came up with for a work around.
Hmmm, “feed display system”? Tell me more about this thing! Sounds like yet another thing we’d need to let our patrons know about to make the vendor-supplied information work better…
I wasn’t sure what to call this “display RSS feed in HTML” sort of thing. del.icio.us now has their own feed to javascript process, but I use Feed2JS mostly, and you can remove the HTML using that one. It’s really more for webdesigners who want to add RSS feeds to their pages. I’ve heard that the new Dreamweaver 8 has a built in system for this, but we don’t have our copies yet.
I’m presenting on Blogs and RSS for faculty on Monday, so I’ll have a bunch of examples posted next week.
Check out David Walker’s “RSS Creator” for an interesting take on how to deal with this issue.
http://public.csusm.edu/dwalker/rss.htm