Month: April 2007

EBSCOhost Update

I received an email today from Kathleen McEvoy at EBSCO Publishing in response to my post on Friday about EBSCOhost‘s new RSS features. She explained that the way I thought the RSS feed should work — a view echoed by David Rothman — is, in fact, the way the site works, contrary to the instructions that were posted there. EBSCO updated the instructions to say more clearly:

As long the EBSCOhost user adds the feed to an aggregrator within one week of its creation, it will not expire, unless the aggregrator does not automatically update results (extremely unlikely) supplied by the feed for two months.

As long as the aggregator pulls down the feed regularly, the service stays alive, as it should.

EBSCOhost Adds RSS Features

See the next post for an update to this item. (30 April 2007).
EBSCOhost has added RSS feeds for any search you execute within its databases. Once you’ve activated this new feature on the “New Features” page, linked from the upper right corner of EBSCOhost pages (it’s called “One Step Alerts” — the press release omits the name), any search you run in the database can be turned in to an RSS feed for updates. Simply click the “Create alert for this search” link and receive a link for the corresponding RSS feed.
Items in the feed are article titles and brief citations. The “Read More” link takes you to a full citation page with an OpenURL link for your library (assuming your library has one set up). If you’re logged in, you can receive the alerts by email as well as RSS; no login is required for the RSS feed, though. Your feeds last indefinitely as long as you access the feeds within one week of creation and no more than two months goes by without new data in the feed.
My only quibble is with the two-month inactivity limit on the feed itself. Search alerts should be a “fire and forget” service — they run until cancelled. Perhaps a better expiration date would be based on another kind of inactivity — for example, the feed is not accessed (by an aggregator or feed reader) or the user does not click through to the full citation for the full citation in some extended period of time. After all, search alerts do not necessarily serve a short-term role — for me, they are very useful tools when I want to stay on top of a topic over the long-term. I’m more likely to create a search alert on a topic where “new stuff” is irregular or unpredictable than when information comes so quickly that I remember to look myself.
Overall, though, this is an excellent service and a model for other vendors to emulate.

[Via Peter Scott’s Library Blog.]

Library of Congress Blog

The granddaddy of American libraries has become one with its multitudinous siblings descendants: the Library of Congress now has its very own weblog. The blog’s author, Matt Raymond, writes that his blog’s mission will “be in keeping with the spirit of the Library’€™s mission as a whole: ‘to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.'”

I noted with interest that the blog’s author, Matt Raymond, is the library’s Director of Communications and a journalist by education. Although I’d find professional and personal interest in a librarian blogger’s perspective on the library, I’m impressed that the Library of Congress has decided to use blogs and RSS as a communications and marketing tool. Welcome to the biblioblogosphere!

Google AJAX Feed API

Google announced a new API this week, the Google AJAX Feed API. In a nutshell, it allows you to use Google’s cache of RSS feeds (the same cache that makes Google Reader work) for whatever purpose you want: recent posts from your favorite blog (à la Feed2JS), mashups, or anything else.
Results are returned in JSON, XML (the original feed source), or both. It supports all flavors of RSS and Atom.
I’ve just started playing with this — but here’s a completely unstyled list of headlines from CNN pulled down and displayed using this API: RSS4Lib Google API Test.

Legislative Feeds Directory

Thanks to contributions from RSS4Lib readers and a bit of online searching, I’ve put together the start of a directory of legislatures (national bodies and, for the United States, state legislatures) that offer RSS feeds to track current legislation in one way or another. See Legislation Feeds for the list to date.

If you know of other legislative bodies that offer their constituents an RSS tool for tracking legislation, please send them to legislationfeeds@rss4lib.com.

RSS Tracking for Canadian Legislation

WisBlawg’s Bonnie Shucha points us to a May 2006 item at Library Boy: RSS feeds for pending legislation in the Canadian parliament.
To see it in action, go to the LEGISINFO site and click on any of the lists of bill under “Senate” or “House of Commons” on the left side the screen. The result is, not surprisingly, a list of bills under consideration. The pleasant surprise is that each bill comes with an RSS feed to update you whenever that bill’s status changes.
I’m impressed. Perhaps there’s a similar tool in the U.S. Library of Congress’s THOMAS legislative toolset, but I can’t find it. I should note that they are working on a new search interface that allows searching by topic or legislator, the search results are not “RSSified.” (See “About the New THOMAS” to learn more — and try out — the new search tools.) It seems foolish to launch a search service without allowing an RSS feed of the search results to your users.
Are there are other national or local governments that offer legislation tracking via RSS? Leave a note in the comments and I’ll compile a list.
Update 11 Apr 2007 Changed link to LEGISINFO page to go directly to legislation.

[From Library Boy via WisBlawg.]