Disseminating News Within Your OrganisationA 90 minute workshop session on Disseminating News Within Your Organisation was given on Wednesday 5th September 2001 at the JANET User Support Workshop held at the University of Loughborough on 4-6th September 2001.
Many members of IT service departments, Libraries, etc. will be involved in the provision of news services. This may take the form of paper newsletters, email announcements, use of Usenet news groups, etc.
In this hands-on session delegates will discuss the pros and cons of these approaches to news dissemination. Delegates will then evaluate use of news feeds for their institution. A summary of recent innovations in this area will be given. The use of the RSS (Rich / RDF Site Summary) standard for news feeds within the RDN (Resource Discovery Network) will be described. Delegates will have the opportunity to create a news feed for use within their institution using a variety of applications including open source software developed at UKOLN.
At the end of the session participants will be in a position to consider how they can deploy news feeds within their own institutions.
The workshop session will be led by Brian Kelly and Pete Cliff, UKOLN. The session will be held in a PC cluster with networked PCs. In addition a networked PC with display will be needed by the presenters.
The following timetable is subject to change.
| Time | Topic | Comments |
| 16:00 | Introduction | Session aims, introduction from facilitator |
| 16:05 | Why We Need Automated News Feeds | Small group exercise in which participants review the flow of news information both within their institution and from external news sources. The limitations of manual procedures for processing news information will be reviewed. |
| 16:20 | Standards For News Feeds | Presentation on external news feeds, the problems with proprietary solutions and an introduction to standards for news feeds. |
| 16:35 | Approaches To Automated News Feeds | Hands-on exercise in which participants make use of a number of automated news feed services. |
| 17:00 | Creating Your Own RSS News Feeds | Hands-on exercise in which participants will create an RSS news channel and deploy it on a Web site. |
| 17:20 | Deployment Issues | Group discussion on the deployment issues for news services. |
| 15:25 | Conclusions: slides | Summary |
The following URLs are used in the exercises and demonstrations: