Month: August 2005

Subject-Specific New Acquisitions via RSS

Check out the University of Alabama Library’s Recently Cataloged Titles Via RSS. Alabama faculty, staff, and students can subscribe to an RSS feed of new books as they are added to the library catalog. There are a whopping 325 subject feeds to choose from — which should make sufficiently narrow topics that everyone will find something they want without feeling overburdened by books that are of no interest. I’ll bet that as this catches on, new books will have an instant waiting list.
According to Douglas Anderson, who developed this application,

These RSS feeds are produced from our Voyager database system by a program I developed in perl using the DBI, DBD::Oracle, and MARC::Record modules. It generates up to 325 subject-oriented RSS feeds daily based on LC, SuDoc, and NLM call numbers, and is designed so that it could use Dewey call numbers as well, if desired. The recent adoption here of a campus portal system, which uses SCT’s Luminis software, was the motivation to develop this. Luminis can easily pull external RSS feeds into user-definable “channels” on the portal.

Doug adds that this is brand new, so he’s not sure what the adoption rate will be on campus. But they’re going to have several promotional activities during the fall term, primarily targeting faculty at first.

Integrating Blogs and Subject Guides

The Edmonton Public Library‘s subject guides are an excellent example of how RSS feeds can be integrated into library subject guide pages. See, for example, the guides to Architecture and Books Similar to the Da Vinci Code.
Both of these subject guides offer a variety of static links to other web and library resources. They also have a section of “Blog Entries” — comments and suggestions by EPL staff to other resources. According to Peter Schoenberg, the EPL’s Virtual Services Librarian,

Our distributed subject page authors/editors, can add a feed to their page by typing the url of the feed into a web form on their edit page. They can add a blog entry in the same way (typing text in a box). The format, title and page placement are all controlled by our web edit pages.
Not sure how many blog entries we will be seeing, but we are hoping it will allow a more personal and less institutional feel to the subject pages.
We use our home built cold fusion pages to provide the content management / web edit pages for our authors.

EPL naturally offers RSS Feeds for their subject guides along with book reviews by patrons (in fiction, non-fiction, kids, and teens).
[Via [Web4Lib.]

RSS to Augment Subject Guides

More good stuff from Web4Lib: Several libraries have included RSS feeds from relevant sources in their subject guide pages. This makes bringing the latest information (whether that is articles, news, products, databases, etc.) to your patrons with minimal web page editing. Assuming, of course, that you have a source for good information that you can draw from, such as a trusted weblog or a database provider’s ‘latest articles’ feed. Several examples of this sort of tool:

Somewhat related, I’m working on a project that will eventually include RSS feeds for resources added to our subject guides.

Bibliography of Blogs in the Library World

Amanda Etches-Johnson at BlogWithoutaLibrary.net maintains a bibliography of RSS-related articles and books. Check out her exhaustive collection of articles about blogging & RSS in the library world. If you’re looking for thought-starters — or literature to support your desire to use blogs and RSS — this is a great place to start.
She updates her furl archive more frequently than the blog page.

RSS Creator

Dave Walker at the Cal State San Marcos library announced a preview version of his RSS Creator (version 0.1). A Flash demo of the software is available. Tools like this really open the doors to bring the benefits of RSS to our patrons — without necessarily needing to educate our patrons on what RSS is or how it’s used. Walker writes in Web4Lib:

The system leverages Ex Libris’ SFX and Metalib systems (using Metalib’s
XML-based API) to create the feeds, but the idea behind it is not specific to SFX or Metalib, and could be done with other technology. Here are some of the benefits:
(1) Gives a library instant access to 20,000 to 40,000 or more feeds [by creating] an RSS feed for any journal or newspaper indexed by one of our databases, so long as that database is searchable via
Metalib….
(2) Requires virtually no discovery, collection, or maintenance. All of the information about the journals is already available (and updated) in the SFX knowledge base. A library simply downloads this information out of SFX, uploads it into RSS Creator….
(3) All links point back to SFX
[…]
It is, in other words, a large, free RSS-based table of contents system. I just need to find some time in between more pressing matters to finish it up. But I’m hoping to roll it out to our faculty here this fall.
[Via the Web4Lib listserv. Original posting.

Student Research by RSS Hits the Mainstream

RSS Feeds College Students’ Diet for Research, an article in the 1 August 2005 USA Today highlights one way college students are taking advantage of RSS to do their research. One student at the University of Pennsylvania, “peruses summaries of the latest articles about stem cell research. She quickly dismisses the first three articles but pauses on the fourth before clicking to read the entire story.” Another student, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says, “Running searches on Google or Yahoo! will bring back so many irrelevant sources. There’s the issue of making sure the sources you do find are credible.”
Sounds like students have twigged to the significance of RSS. Is your library offering easy access to these information streams to your students and faculty? How much promotion are you doing of the RSS-ified resources you already have in your digital collections? Our library just launched a guide to using RSS for research alerts and will be including similar material in our beginning-of-year workshops for new students — but I suspect there’s a lot more we could be doing.

[Via TP Wire Service.]