Month: June 2005

Why not put RSS feeds into a browser toolbar so your patrons have the latest news in their browser? That’s what the Lansing, Illinois, Public Library asked and answered in the form of a very cool toolbar.
If you’re using Windows ME/NT/2000/XP and Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, you can use their toolbar. It’s similar to the Google toolbar — it provides a search box you can use on the Lansing library catalog, their regional library catalog, the web, or a variety of other sources. There’s a link to Instant Message the reference desk.
And — here’s the kicker — there are four RSS feeds built in. The library publishes four newsletters — three by age of audience (adult, teen, and youth) and one for IT issues. These four feeds are listed in the toolbar. Clicking on a headline on the drop-down menu for any of these four RSS feeds pulls up the weblog entry in the browser. Very cool!

I stumbled on an interesting idea through a longish clickpath which led me to Cataloging the blogosphere in Infomancy. In a nutshell, Christopher Harris proposes converting RSS items into MARC records using XSLT transforms. Which is a pretty neat idea.
I’m inferring from Christopher’s post that this would be a valuable tool for selected, probably edited, sources — he mentions the Librarians’ Index to the Internet in particular as a good source; and David Bigwood of Catalogablog adds the Scout Report as another possible input. And I’ll suggest the Internet Public Library as another source of vetted content for generating reference sites that other libraries might consider adding to their own catalogs.
How many libraries, I wonder, are currently adding web resources to their catalogs? And how many of those could use an automatically generated Choice combined with the MARC record for the resource? A one-click “add to my catalog” resource for librarians, complete with MARC data.

I stumbled on an article ("Geotagging Web Pages and RSS Feeds") from the January 2005 issue of Linux Journal. Geotagging is adding geographic metadata to web sites or RSS feeds. For example, a blog entry about a restaurant could give the location of the restaurant in any number of standard ways:

• Latitude/longitude (otherwise known as "ICBM," a term dating back to the good old days of early Unix and the Cold War), or by street address, or by city, state, and country.
• Using Geo Tags — geo.position [latitude and longitude], geo.placename [natural-language name of the place], geo.region [ISO country subdivision].
• In RDF, the Geographical Vocabulary Workspace.

As the article points out, there are relatively few search engines that make use of this data, but among those that do are A2B and (for RSS feeds) RDF Mapper.
I haven’t been able to find a library making use of this technology, but a couple things strike me about it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to tag a local history or cultural guide with relevant metadata so that a search tool could pull together both information about the locations as well as where they are? Or to collect fiction set in the library’s home town and include, along with the reviews of the books, tags indicating where the book’s main action takes place?
Or, more broadly, simply tagging various library branches with geographical information might make it easier for someone to get from a GPS-enabled cell phone to your physical location — via your web site.