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Environmental Studies
Email Alerts
Many journals provide the table of contents for new issues through email (as well as through RSS, see below), only requiring free registration on their Web site. Visit Email and RSS Alerts for ES for links to major journals. If there’s a journal you’d like added to the list, contact Jean Amaral.
If the library subscribes to the journal, either in print or through a database, you can access any articles in the alerts that look interesting through the library. If the library doesn’t subscribe to the journal, you can request the articles through Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery.
Many databases also allow you to set up email alerts, either for a journal or for a search (subject, keyword, or author) that you’ve done. To learn how to save a search, visit a database’s help section, or ask your Environmental Studies librarian, Jean Amaral, for assistance.
Blogs
Looking for a perspective outside mainstream media? Blogs have emerged as one of the most important vehicles for citizen journalism. Blogs, written by one or more folks who’ve got ideas they want to share, are Web sites that you can visit as frequently as you like, or you can subscribe to them through an RSS aggregator (see below). Be sure to check out Steve Chase’s blog The Well-Trained Activist.
And it’s easy to keep up with your favorite blogs using an RSS aggregator (see below).
RSS Feed Readers
RSS stands for “really simple syndication” or “rich site summary,” and it’s a format that uses XML, a programming language, to aggregate new material from a Web site. But all you really need to know is this: RSS feed readers or aggregators are the news delivery boys and girls of the online world. Using RSS feeds, aggregators deliver information to your virtual doorstep, throwing the online news onto your virtual porch.
The porch, in this case, is a free online service provided by such sites as Bloglines, MyYahoo!, and Google Reader. These services run software that reads the RSS feeds to which you subscribe through Web sites that are of interest to you. You access your RSS reader account just as you would an online email account, with a username and password. It is a beautiful and wondrous thing to log on to your account and on one page, in one location, have access to the headlines and stories of The New York Times, BBC, The Economist, next to ESPN’s sports scores and your niece’s blog. No visiting ten or twenty Web site—or not, because you just don’t have time or didn’t remember. You only have to visit your online porch, pull up the rocking chair, and begin browsing.
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