One way of keeping up-to-date is through web sites that have news updates or continuous news feeds related to your areas of interest within public health. You can add these sites to your browser bookmarks or favorites. You could even make one of these sites your default search page so you see it first thing in the morning.

Example resources: Take some time to explore the following web sites with news components related to public health; evaluate their relevance to your own work. There may also be discipline or specialty-specific web sites with news sections geared to your professional interests.

Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce: News
This site contains some public health news, but may be more valuable as a collection of links to other public health news sites.

National Library of Medicine: MedlinePlus
Offers the last 30 days of news from the New York Times Syndicate, Reuters Health Information and others.

Weblogs, or blogs, as they are commonly known, are frequently updated Web sites that point to and comment on resources elsewhere on the Web and sometimes offer onsite commentary. The content of the blog is only as valuable as the editorial capacity and commitment of the person(s) providing it. There are many blogs that announce new resources - one example of this is Bringing Health Information to the Community (BHIC) by Siobhan Champ-Blackwell, National Network of Libraries of Medicine at http://medstat.med.utah.edu/blogs/BHIC/

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are a method of distributing Web site content to RSS reader software. You must use a program known as a RSS News Aggregator (also called news reader) to collect, update and read RSS feeds. A number of free and commercial News Aggregators are available. Some Web browsers such as Firefox and Safari can handle RSS feeds.

Example RSS Readers:
SharpReader - Windows RSS Reader
http://www.sharpreader.net/

NetNewsWire - Mac OSX RSS Reader
http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

Look for an RSS or XML logo to identify feeds. RSS feeds are available for journal contents (see MMWR example below), PubMed search results and many news sources.

Sample RSS feeds:
Public Health News Center - Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/rss

Medscape Headlines in RSS
http://www.medscape.com/pages/public/rss