Information Trapping

Subscribing to RSS Feeds or Email Alerts to Make Research Easier

Don’t spend time going to blogs and websites over and over to see what new information has become available on your issue. Let your computer do the work for you. By subscribing to RSS feeds, you are telling your sites to send updates to you instead. This is called information trapping and will save you valuable research time.

The first thing you need to do is gather your websites and blogs together.

Then, set up a reader.

Find a Reader

• A reader, also known as an aggregator, serves as a location to house the feeds to which you subscribe. The images in this presentation are from Google, but there are many other readers out there, all working more or less similarly. Most readers are also free. Once you set up your reader, it should look something like this:

The frame on the left shows how many new items I have to read and all of the folders that house my subscriptions. Since I have so many feeds, I organize them in folders. The larger frame on the right shows some of the updated feeds that have been sent to me. The reader acts like a post office to which my feeds are sent. I can then go to the post office and pick up my feeds to read.

There are several ways to subscribe to a feed. The most common is to look for the orange box in the URL window like the one circled here. You can paste this URL into your reader where it says “add a subscription.”

The feed will show up in your subscriptions frame and you can begin reading.

Alternately, you may see a series of quick links that will automatically add the RSS subscription to your reader for you. Just select the reader you are using.

You may also just see an icon indicating that the site has a feed. To subscribe to a feed from a site displaying one of these icons, click on the icon. You will see a page of code. Just copy the URL to your reader as was described in Slide two.

Email Alerts

• You can also set up alerts about your issue to be sent to your email account. Again, I am using Google for illustration but Yahoo! And other search engines offer the same service.

You key in the search term you want, selecting options on where and how often alerts should be sent, and click on “create alert.” Everything the search engine finds new about your issue will be sent to you.