TRANSFORMING CURRENT AWARENESS THROUGH RSS:
How two projects (ticTOCs and Gold Dust) are using RSS to improve the
information landscape for the 21st century researcher

by Lisa J Rogers†, Simon Hodson‡ and Roddy MacLeod†
† Heriot-Watt University, ‡ University of Hull
ABSTRACT
This paper looks at the current situation with respect to RSS and then reports upon
the findings of the ticTOCs and Gold Dust projects. We will look at the lessons
learnt from developing the ticTOCs service, and also report on two iterations of the
Gold Dust development and use cycles. We will deliver an appraisal of the
effectiveness of the raft of techniques being employed by Gold Dust. How effective
are current data mining and pattern matching techniques for such an application?
How useful is RSS metadata in this context? These findings will be of considerable
pertinence both for future services which may use RSS Feeds, and for future
research and development in the area of adaptive personalisation using RSS.
FEEDS, INFORMATION OVERLOAD AND RSS ADOPTION
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has emerged as an extremely useful mechanism
through which researchers, practitioners and educators can obtain current
awareness information and be alerted to the existence of new content. RSS is a
XML format that allows content providers to easily share information on the
internet1. Users can subscribe to RSS Feeds using a feed reader and are alerted to
new items in the feeds to which they have subscribed each time they view their
feed reader. Typically, an RSS Feed contains a title, together with either a short
summary of the content or the full text, and a link back to the original site2.
However RSS can also be extended3 through the use of modules to provide more
descriptive metadata such as Dublin Core4 and PRISM5. Many publishers of Journal
Tables of Contents are already taking advantage of this, allowing them to include
metadata in their RSS feeds such as authors, ISSN, volume, issue and page
numbers along with article titles and abstracts.
There are many types of RSS feeds. Typically, news and blog updates are the most
common use of RSS. Hammond et al3 describe some of the feeds that science
publishers are starting to provide, including other content aside from Journal
Tables of Contents, such as citation alerts, news, jobs, product releases, press
releases, reviews and events. Through the work on the Gold Dust project6 a
number of feeds were identified that may be of interest to engineering academics
and researchers, and these can be placed in the following categories: journal tables
of contents (TOCs), calls for papers, forthcoming conference and events
announcements, funding opportunities, new theses and dissertations, new book
announcements, subject related news, new items in institutional repositories,

1 Moffat M (2003) “RSS - A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers”
http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/rss_primer/
2 Cooke CA (2006) “Current Awareness in the New Millennium”, Medical Reference Services Quarterly,
25:1, pp 59 —69
3 Hammond T, Hannay T, Lund B (2004) “The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and
Annotation on the Web’ D-Lib Magazine 10:12
4 RSS 1.0 Modules : Dublin Core http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/dc/
5 RSS 1.0 Modules : PRISM http://www.prismstandard.org/resources/mod_prism.html
6 Gold Dust Project http://www.hull.ac.uk/golddust/

professional society news, patents, component announcements, suppliers,
standards and new teaching and learning resources.
Yet a recent White Paper7 from Forrester Research noted that RSS adoption by
users within the Internet population was only 11%. Not only that, but the report
showed that relatively few non-users had any interest in using feeds. In addition,
for those who do use and subscribe to RSS feeds, it is only too easy to become
swamped by the resulting information overload. Although RSS use has grown over
the last few years (An OCLC Report8 in 2005 suggested only 5% of information
users used RSS based upon a survey of over 3000 respondents) there is still some
lack of willingness on the part of researchers in its take up. In 2005 a White
Paper9 from Yahoo suggested that although only a small percentage of users know
they are using RSS, 27% use it unknowingly via personalised home page services
such as MyYahoo or iGoogle through the syndication of news headlines, etc.
In 2007 Hardesty and Sugarman conducted a survey10 of Academic Librarians
about the methods they used to keep up to date with professional literature. Out of
the 707 respondents 15% used RSS Feeds. Only 23% of those surveyed said that
information overload did not limit their ability to keep up to date, with the
remainder commenting that information overload did limit their ability to keep up
to date to a lesser or greater extent. Chen and Tai11 describe the problem with
information overload on the internet in general as a major problem, with the
continual growth of the internet they estimated that the content available doubled
every 18 months. They suggest new approaches are needed to combat this
problem so that users are presented with relevant information.
What can information professionals do to make sure that the opportunities afforded
by RSS are not wasted? Should they concentrate on teaching researchers about
the benefits of RSS in the hope that uptake will subsequently increase, or should
they work with, and regard, RSS as a component of an invisible infrastructure
through which to develop simple user-facing services? The two projects described
below are focussed on the latter.
PROJECTS
ticTOCs12 and Gold Dust are two large-scale consortium JISC-funded projects which
are based around RSS and which have implications for the international information
community. ticTOCs has developed a freely available journal current awareness
service which aggregates tables of contents RSS feeds for over 12,000 journals
from more than 430 publishers. Gold Dust is exploring ways in which the
development of pervasively generated Personal Interest Profiles (PIPs) from
ticTOCs usage data may be used to pan the current information flood of RSS feeds
for items of significance to individual researchers - the eponymous ‘gold dust’.
Whilst ticTOCs responds to a very clearly defined use-case: the need of researchers
to keep up to date with current journal tables of contents, Gold Dust is in contrast

7 Katz JM, Spivey Overby C, Owyang JK, Cummings T, Murphy E (2008) “What's Holding RSS Back?
Consumers Still Don't Understand This Really Simple Technology Forrester Research.
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,47150,00.html
8 De Rosa C et al. (2005). “Perceptions of libraries and information resources: A report to the OCLC
membership”. Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc.
9 Grossnickle, J. et al. 2005. RSS–Crossing into the mainstream. Yahoo!Inc.
http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss/RSS_whitePaper1004.pdf#search=%22%22RSS%20%E2%80%93%20
Crossing%20into%20the%20mainstream%22%22
10 Hardesty S, Sugarman T (2007). “Academic Librarians, Professional Literature, and New
Technologies: A Survey” The Journal of Academic Librarianship Vol 33 No 2, pp. 196-205.
11 Chen CT, Tai WS (2003). “An Information Push-Delivery System Design for Personal Information
Service on The Internet” Information Processing and Management 39, pp. 873-888.
12 ticTOCS Journal Tables of Contents Service http://www.tictocs.ac.uk