The Ann Arbor District Library has done it again — in addition to all the other cool features their catalog/web site offers, it’s now possible to do a search in the catalog and save it as an RSS feed.
Why do this, you ask? As soon as something new appears in the library collection that matches your original query, you’ll know about it. For example, if you added this RSS feed to your aggregator, you’d be told whenever a new book appears with “broccoli” in the catalog information. (Amazingly, there are 13 items listed, of which six are neither cookbooks nor James Bond films.)
The savvy library patron will be jumping on new books even faster now.
[Via Edward Vielmetti’s Vacuum blog.]
Thanks Ken. I’ve been beta testing this for a bit now and find it to be handy for current awareness, and to make sure I get a stream of book ideas coming from the catalog.
One piece of this puzzle that my blog entry didn’t show is a Firefox search plugin that makes searching the AADL catalog as easy as searching Google. I have a screencast in the works that shows the whole sequence end to end.