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.

Related posts:

  1. RSS to Augment Subject Guides
  2. Integrating Blogs and Subject Guides
  3. Dissertations from ProQuest by Subject
  4. RSS Feed for Online Books

2 thoughts on “Subject-Specific New Acquisitions via RSS”

  1. 以 RSS feed 訂閱新書通知

    又一個圖書館應用 RSS 實例，從 RSS4Lib 得知 The University of Alabama Library 開始提供 RSS 服務，只要館藏系統中有新的書目，讀者便可以透過所訂閱 RSS feed 收到新書的書刊名及出版資訊，並且可以ç…

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