Mixing Z39.50 and RSS

I’ve talked about lots of way libraries are making it possible to learn about new materials via RSS — but what if you’re an eager beaver and want to get on the waiting list the second the book is in the catalog, not when it’s ready for circulation?
The Paranoid Agnostic writes about Using RSS and Z39.50 to Find Books Your Library Doesn’t Have — Yet. in a recent post. He offers a Perl script that will query his library’s catalog (using Z39.50), find the most recently added items, and republish them via RSS. So he can then jump into the holds queue a bit ahead of the rest of the crowd.
He’s not offering the code to the public yet — but tells you to watch his RSS feed for details. The author promises it before the Access 2005 conference in mid-October.

Related posts:

  1. The Paradox of RSS and Web Scale Discovery
  2. Ann Arbor District Library & RSS
  3. RSS to MARC
  4. Subject-Specific New Acquisitions via RSS

2 thoughts on “Mixing Z39.50 and RSS”

  1. I did post a link to some code in the middle of the article (look for the words “the program” http://winterstorm.ca/download/newvideo.rss.txt). I didn’t make it at all clear though! That is the original code I wrote to get a list of the latest videos from a library.
    I made it very unclear at the end of my post what I was doing with the new code as well. Before Access 2005 (library tech conference), I plan to clean it up and make it more appropriate for the specific purpose of finding things your library doesn’t have. Specifically, it needs to be altered to handle multiple searches and more types of search. Also, the code currently generates some invalid RSS.
    I’m glad you liked it!

Comments are closed.