Category: RSS Tools

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,

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.

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:

• Morrisville State College Library
• Georgia Tech (a couple examples):
• Biomedical guide
• Physics guide

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

Jim Robertson at the New Jersey Institute of Technology Library is pulling recent journal tables of contents into his catalog using RSS. In a recent posting to the Web4Lib listserv, he provides several links to see what he’s doing:

Once you click through to the Detailed Record view, scroll down — and there’s the latest TOC for the journal (in this example, it’s the Journal of Architectural Education). Jim is using ColdFusion to, in his words, “hack some interesting things in Endeavor’s Voyager.” He’s also using Feed2RSS to turn the RSS feed into usable HTML.

Or, in the words of Tim Bray, its steward, “It’s cooked and ready to serve.” Atom is another data format for accomplishing similar things to what RSS does — promoting content, distributing “what’s new” feeds, and so forth. What are the differences? Well, they’re largely technical and largely irrelevant to the end user.
A couple of the features that differentiate Atom over RSS are:

• Atom has a standardized method of auto-discovery (of finding the feeds that relate to a given web page).
• Atom is an XML namespace — which means entries can themselves contain formatted XML text without having to escape all the characters. This will be a boon to data reuse via webfeed.

The full range of differences is in an easy-to-understand comparison of RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0.
The key thing is that feed readers and aggregators will soon be accepting Atom 1.0 feeds (they often understand the current version of Atom — 0.3).

Stephen Bell makes a great point in his 2005 ALA poster presentation, “If Youæ± e Going To Blog, Blog It To Courseware“:

I’ve described such RSS-to-HTML software in a previous post. And I’m going to try doing exactly what Steve suggests in our school’s Blackboard implementation. I’ll let you know what happens.

The Infopeople Project in California offers RSS feeds for its events calendar. The calendar draws from a variety of sources and includes individual RSS feeds for workshops, conferences, webcasts, and online courses. They list their feeds in one handy place.
While this is specific to California (except the library conferences feed), it shows a nice integration of a calendar, on-screen display of useful information, and RSS feeds.

The Ebling Health Sciences Library at the University of Wisconsin offers a list of medical and science journals that have RSS feeds. The list of titles with RSS feeds. The library subscribes to the feeds and presents the most recent table of contents on the screen. Each article is linked through the library’s proxy server to the full text content available to library patrons. And, of course, there’s a link to the actual RSS feed from the publisher. (This publisher-provided feed, of course, does not link through the library’s proxy server.)
Presumably, with a big more data massaging, the RSS feed could direct patrons through an OpenURL link resolver to the most appropriate source of the journal (online, interlibrary loan, etc.).

Why not put RSS feeds into a browser toolbar so your patrons have the latest news in their browser? That’s what the Lansing, Illinois, Public Library asked and answered in the form of a very cool toolbar.
If you’re using Windows ME/NT/2000/XP and Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, you can use their toolbar. It’s similar to the Google toolbar — it provides a search box you can use on the Lansing library catalog, their regional library catalog, the web, or a variety of other sources. There’s a link to Instant Message the reference desk.
And — here’s the kicker — there are four RSS feeds built in. The library publishes four newsletters — three by age of audience (adult, teen, and youth) and one for IT issues. These four feeds are listed in the toolbar. Clicking on a headline on the drop-down menu for any of these four RSS feeds pulls up the weblog entry in the browser. Very cool!

I stumbled on an interesting idea through a longish clickpath which led me to Cataloging the blogosphere in Infomancy. In a nutshell, Christopher Harris proposes converting RSS items into MARC records using XSLT transforms. Which is a pretty neat idea.
I’m inferring from Christopher’s post that this would be a valuable tool for selected, probably edited, sources — he mentions the Librarians’ Index to the Internet in particular as a good source; and David Bigwood of Catalogablog adds the Scout Report as another possible input. And I’ll suggest the Internet Public Library as another source of vetted content for generating reference sites that other libraries might consider adding to their own catalogs.
How many libraries, I wonder, are currently adding web resources to their catalogs? And how many of those could use an automatically generated Choice combined with the MARC record for the resource? A one-click “add to my catalog” resource for librarians, complete with MARC data.

I stumbled on an article ("Geotagging Web Pages and RSS Feeds") from the January 2005 issue of Linux Journal. Geotagging is adding geographic metadata to web sites or RSS feeds. For example, a blog entry about a restaurant could give the location of the restaurant in any number of standard ways:

• Latitude/longitude (otherwise known as "ICBM," a term dating back to the good old days of early Unix and the Cold War), or by street address, or by city, state, and country.
• Using Geo Tags — geo.position [latitude and longitude], geo.placename [natural-language name of the place], geo.region [ISO country subdivision].
• In RDF, the Geographical Vocabulary Workspace.

As the article points out, there are relatively few search engines that make use of this data, but among those that do are A2B and (for RSS feeds) RDF Mapper.
I haven’t been able to find a library making use of this technology, but a couple things strike me about it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to tag a local history or cultural guide with relevant metadata so that a search tool could pull together both information about the locations as well as where they are? Or to collect fiction set in the library’s home town and include, along with the reviews of the books, tags indicating where the book’s main action takes place?
Or, more broadly, simply tagging various library branches with geographical information might make it easier for someone to get from a GPS-enabled cell phone to your physical location — via your web site.