I had the pleasure of attending the Syndicate, Aggregate, Communicate: New Web Tools in Real Applications for Libraries, Companies and Regular Folk conference earlier this week. While I was familiar, for the most part, with the technologies that were being discussed, I came away truly impressed with the variety of applications of these technologies that my fellow librarians have already come up with.

So I started looking for resources that described all these neat library-specific applications of RSS. And nothing leaped out at me as that collection point. Which brings us here -- to RSS4Lib. I'm not entirely sure what I want this blog to be. Something of a mix between a clearinghouse of novel uses of RSS and a place to brainstorm new ideas.

So who am I? My name is Ken Varnum. I'm a librarian at the Ginn Library at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I've been doing web site design, information architecture, and project management in libraries for 11 years, at the Ginn Library, Ford Motor Company's research library, and the Open Media Research Institute. I have an abiding interesting in building information systems that give my customers access to the information they need before they have to ask for it. And that is why RSS grabs my interest so strongly.

Here's an idea from Frequently Answered Questions about librarians embedding resources in course management software via RSS. She begins:

Frequently Answered Questions: Embedded librarians

"Embedded librarians
The Iraq war brought us the concept of "embedded journalists". Now we have the concept of "embedded librarians". An embedded journalist is supposed to have better access to a story; an embedded librarian provides better access for students to him/herself and to the library's resources."

She notes that embedding the whole librarian may be impractical, and suggests, in the alternative:

"It is also possible to embed RSS feeds in a webpage. Using an online bookmarking service, a librarian can create an RSS feed for a collection of resources, including websites, databases, even searches and specific articles within the databases. If the professor keeps the librarian updated on new assignments, new resources could be added regularly. LTA#44-Integrating RSS Feeds into your Course Management System gives a good description of how the technology works."

It's probably far from a secret, but the University of Minnesota library offers everyone in the University community a weblog of their own. UThink has been around just over a year -- they celebrated the service's first birthday on April 12, 2005 -- and has an impressive level of use:

Just think what a powerful communication tool your library could offer your user community. Whether for book discussions, community organizations, "birds-of-a-feather" gatherings among patrons with similar interests.... The possibilities are amazing.

There are a number of tools out there that allow you to easily take someone's RSS feed and plug it in to your web page. The little-known secret is that at least one of them requires no programming knowledge beyond basic HTML and -- for the adventurous -- a bit of CSS.

Feed2JS, created and maintained by some clever people at the Maricopa Community Colleges, is a free service that takes an RSS feed you specify, wraps it in some CSS, and delivers it through a one-line JavaScript tag in your HTML document. Wait, it's really not even that complicated.

For an example of how this handy application works, go to my library's home page. Notice the headlines under the heading "The Ginn Weblog." Those headlines are drawn dynamically from the Ginn Library's weblog, the GinnBlog. Whenever we publish something new to the blog, the newest article appears at the top of the list on the library home page, and the oldest one goes away. Automatically. The code to it, provided through a web form at the Feed2JS site where you simply paste in the URL of the RSS feed, is simple:

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww322.pair.com%2F
ginnblog%2Fmt%2Findex.rdf&num=3&date=n" type="text/javascript">

(I also had to play a little bit with a CSS style sheet to make the headlines fit into the space on the library home page and to match the font, size, and color of type on the page -- but that was just as easy as adding a few elements to my site's style sheet using the directions kindly provided.

Maricopa is feeling the pain of lots of people using this script, downloading reformatted feeds from their site. If you plan to use it heavily, they'd appreciate it if you downloaded and installed the PHP scripts to your own server...

Feed2JS is a very easy way to take advantage of RSS feeds -- news, weather, your library's blog, you name it.

Let me know if you're using this tool on your library's site by leaving a comment with your page's URL.

Talis, makers of an integrated library system (what we're calling the library catalog these days), are working on building RSS into their product. A brief white paper on their site outlines the uses they see for RSS as a patron communication tool. They are also looking at RSS as a simple way to pass information about, for example, new acquisitions, from the main catalog to local systems. (Via Tate's Space.)

I found an exhaustive list of public, academic, special, and other libraries providing blogs and RSS feeds to their user communities. Blog Without a Library even offers RSS feeds by library type -- so you can keep track of the latest additions to the list. Fantastic stuff!

The New York Times had an article on Saturday -- College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age -- that got me thinking. The article describes how the University of Texas at Houston is converting its undergraduate library into an "electronic information commons." (The books -- about 70,000 of them -- are being moved to other campus libraries where they will still be accessible to all.) As described in the article,

This reflects the changing ways that people, especially today's teens and twentysomethings, approach scholarship.

Now, if physical libraries are being redesigned to provide space and facilities for digital learning and scholarship, then the library itself should make take advantage of the same technologies our patrons use. Give people what they want before they know they want it -- or at a minimum, provide them with a suite of tools to make their quest for answers easier. Send them notices when books similar to items they've previously checked out are available. Let them save a catalog query as an RSS feed so they'll know when new materials are available. Provide one-stop metasearch capabilities of all the databases the library offers. We are, after all, in the service industry -- we provide people with the information they need to do whatever it is they do.

Here's a quick and easy way to augment your Government Documents collection: FirstGov, the U.S. Government's web portal, now offers RSS feeds in a range of subjects. Each of these broad topics has a number of entries underneath -- and they're obviously planning for a lot more:

• Agriculture RSS Feeds
• Consumer RSS Feeds
• Cyber Security RSS Feeds
• Data and Statistics RSS Feeds
• Education RSS Feeds
• Federal Personnel RSS Feeds
• Health RSS Feeds
• International Relations RSS Feeds
• Military RSS Feeds
• Forest RSS Feeds
• Science RSS Feeds

So if you're interested in Product Safety Recalls (XML) or National Agricultural Statistics Service News (XML) -- or lots of other stuff -- here's your place to go.

What a simple way to keep your patrons up to date on whatever part of the bureaucracy is of interest to them...

[Updated 19 May 2005 to correct URLs which I'd butchered by mistake.]

The University of Montana's Mansfield Library maintains the Government News for Montana weblog. A group of four librarians at Montana institutions keep it updated with new legislation and other information pertinent to the state government. And, of course, updates are available via RSS.

I think this is really neat. The Roselle, Illinois, Public Library is publishing a kids-only book review weblog: Blogger Book Club.

Kids in grades 4-6 can sign up to be authors. The Youth Services department has selected a set of books for review (mostly nominees for the 2004 Rebecca Caudill Young Readers Award). These young bloggers can then post their reviews of any of the books they have read. Registered bloggers can also comment on other blogger's reviews.

In addition to the rules for bloggers, the library also has a separate page of explanation for parents -- a clever move to assuage any doubts parents might have about their children becoming public writers.

Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom : RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators
This guide for educators has some great ideas for using weblogs and RSS in the classroom. Library instructors may find some useful ideas for their information literacy classes.

Links (beta) is a group linklog -- bringing the tagging power of Flickr and Furl to the world of the blog.

From links' about page:

If you poke through the site, you can find all sorts of blog entries that Yale users have found useful -- nicely tagged and organized.

RSS4Lib has been linked in the WAG [Yale Medical Web Advisory Group] group with the tags rss, libraries, and blogs. It's not just a respository -- anyone (not just registered users) can also subscribe to the RSS feed for any page in the site -- so you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the WAG group, or for the "libraries" tag.

The Yale Center for Medical Informatics is developing this software -- unalog -- under an open source license. This might be very handy way for a public library to maintain a virtual vertical file -- rather than collecting pamphlets and ephemera by subject or organization, why not use unalog to indicate web sites and assign subject tags? It would also be a handy way to organize information from community groups or local organizations.