Harvard in the News Mentioned on a Blog
Harvard in the News is probably the publication my office is best known for, but we don’t do a very good job of publicizing its existence and that we do it. I’ve never really understood why; it’s just one of those battles I decided isn’t worth fighting. I also think it would be very easy and more practical to do it on a blog than to do it as we’ve been doing it for years as a static Web page someone overwrites each day. And if we could distribute it via a feed, too … More battles I haven’t begun to pursue yet.
At any rate, it’s great to see it mentioned on a colleague’s blog, especially since I had to do it the last two weekends.
September 29th, 2004 at 3:19 pm
HITN is nice… We’ve been enjoying it at Rowland for some years. I didn’t realize you guys did that? From RSS feeds? Or web searches? (And yes, I was wondering who does it on Saturday and Sunday…) Great stuff.
September 29th, 2004 at 3:36 pm
Thanks for the praise! I’ll tell my coworker who does them on the weekdays. He’ll appreciate the kind words.
Yepper, that’s us. Besides the coworker who does them on the weekdays, three or four of us rotate weekend shifts. When I say I’m working on a weekend, that’s almost always what I’m doing, unless there’s something really, really major happening.
We aren’t technologically sophisticated enough yet to use feeds to do them–and I don’t think feeds are sophisticated enough for us to use them in that capacity, either.
LexisNexis and Factiva are where we do the initial searches, which usually retrieve about 100 articles each with some overlap, then we narrow down what we include in HITN to pieces of major importance or wide-spread interest that are available on the Web. We target a few specific publications, too, and have a long list of topics to include and not include, as you might imagine. Sometimes I do Web searches, too.
On an average day, it takes me a little longer than two hours to do clips. Most of the time is spent scouring the Web for links.