Evolving our ‘Articles of Interest’ Service
As part of my role, I spend my Wednesdays trawling through pretty much everything published in journals in the last week that has anything to do with paediatrics (and a lot that doesn’t!). I’d be lying if I said it was my favourite part of the job, but it’s an important part of what we offer — unfortunately, platforms such as KnowledgeShare don’t quite meet our needs as a Trust specialising in paediatrics. This service, now known as ‘Articles of Interest’ (or AOI), has undergone a significant evolution in the last year or so, to make it more user-friendly both for the end users and for the librarian undertaking this (sometimes Sisyphean-feeling) task.
To paint a picture of the history of AOI, we must first go back to 2010, when I was doing my GCSEs and the librarian at that time was setting up the first iteration of AOI, then called Monthly Articles of Interest (or MAI). Hundreds of RSS feeds were created for a variety of journals and PubMed searches, and then added to Netvibes, a feed reader. These feeds were organised by specialty, and users could toggle between specialties by selecting different tabs along the top of the screen. An example of a Netvibes tab can be seen below.
This worked as a service on its own, as anyone with the Netvibes link could access these tabs at any time, without needing to log in. The sheer amount of information these tabs held was truly mind-boggling; my first impression, upon starting this job, was that it was an incredible resource, if a little dated aesthetically. The librarian for our service then had the weekly task of going through each and every one of these feeds and picking out anything that could be relevant to Trust colleagues. Items would then be added to The Spreadsheet, which quickly became my nemesis (see below).
From the beginning, me and this spreadsheet did not see eye to eye. It would frequently crash on me or do weird things to the formatting, usually just when I had managed to get into a rhythm. It was also an accessibility nightmare; if you were dyslexic or colourblind, for example, I can’t imagine you’d get on well with it. When adding articles, they’d be tagged with a number corresponding to a topic or term, which would mean flicking backwards and forwards between the chart of terms to work out which numbers you were looking for (see below). Speaking of these numbered terms, some were in desperate need of evaluation. Finally, to get access to this spreadsheet, those who had signed up to receive it would have to wait for the monthly version to be emailed to them (hence MAI), which they could then only open on a computer due to its layout. In short, I hated this thing, but it seemed to be pretty set… until an opportunity arose.
In April 2025, we received an email from the provider of Netvibes which I can only describe as word salad. Fortunately, they had put the key sentence in bold: “Netvibes.com as a standalone service will be retired”. This didn’t come as a great surprise; I had long had the sense that the writing was on the wall, particularly as previous attempts to access Netvibes through any channels other than the link to our account were seemingly non-existent. However, this email put us on a timer, giving us about 6 weeks to find an alternative and set up shop there.
I saw this as an opportunity to address some of the issues I had with the existing MAI set-up, and quickly identified a provider we could move to: this was Feedly. For our purposes, we had to subscribe to a paid tier, but we managed to do so quickly and set up our hundreds of feeds in Feedly. Rather than being organised into tabs, these were now sorted into folders, where I could view all unread items from all the feeds within in a single folder feed. The interface is also customisable, meaning I can change the font and text size and toggle between light and dark mode. However, the one drawback was that external users could no longer browse our feeds at their leisure; instead, they would still have to rely on The Spreadsheet.
Until March 2026! With our new Knowledge and Library Services Manager, Helen Barlow, taking up the post, I chose that moment to present my alternative to The Spreadsheet: Feedly’s inbuilt boards. While moving to Feedly and its increased efficiency had somewhat reduced the time it took to trawl through the feeds each week, it was still taking me near to an entire working day; much of this was the time it took to add the title and details of each article to The Spreadsheet. However, by creating boards corresponding to each of those numbers on the spreadsheet, I could save items of interest to the relevant board with a couple of clicks. For items published by a journal we subscribe to, I could indicate this by adding a note to the item. Helen gave me the OK to trial this, and the results were undeniable; what had taken up almost a fifth of my working week can now, on average, be done in around 3 hours.
Unlike our feeds, the boards are publicly available, meaning anyone can access them at any time and see what we’ve picked out. Rather than sending out a spreadsheet at the beginning of every month, we now send out a link to the boards (see above). Users can now see the boards as they are updated; if they create their own Feedly account, they can save items to read later. Users can also easily access and browse boards on mobile devices. In addition, I have produced training materials to help our users set up their own feeds in Feedly, if they’d like to see everything on a specific topic rather than our curated selection. Feedback on the boards so far has been very positive, with one person commenting that they are “MUCH better and easier to use than the spreadsheet! Easier to navigate and read”.
I’m still tweaking things as I go, keeping the end user experience in mind as I do so. The boards are a constant work in progress; while I made a lot of changes when setting up the boards in Feedly, I’m able to edit and add new topics as needed, and I’m open to suggestions from users as well. I’ve added a FAQ section to the boards homepage to record the answers to queries we’ve received since making the move.
I have a running to-do list which I plan to slowly implement over time: this includes further refining the feeds to cut down on irrelevant results, and creating a browsable index of boards to help users find what they’re looking for. Ultimately, this service is now a lot more straightforward for both the people running it and the end users, which makes it a success in our eyes.
Beth Gilchrist, Librarian, Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust
