Category: RSS Tools

Pasi Keski-Nisula at the National Library of Health Sciences – Terkko (part of the University of Helsinki) was kind enough to let me know of a new service he has developed. FeedNavigator is a personalizable feed navigator for health sciences information.
In addition to aggregating (and providing search capabilities) for more than 1500 relevant RSS feeds, it also lets you save articles to your own space (“MyFeeds”). Citations for useful items useful to you can be exported to RefWorks. Users of the system who are patrons of several Finnish libraries can access full text through either an SFX (a common OpenURL link resolver) or document delivery service.
The service is free for use by anyone — though a free user registration is required.

Catalogablog notes a new product from BlogBridge called BlogBridge: Library. BlogBridge Library is a server-based tool that libraries — or anyone with a large customer base — can use to organize a multitude of RSS feeds into a coherent and nicely-presented interface. In their post announcing the new product, BlogBridge says:

BBL is not an aggregator. Rather, it’s a tool that says it will make organizing RSS feeds for customer use easier. Individual topics can be assigned to different editors within an organization. Individual feeds and topical collections are available to the end user through RSS and OPML links, respectively.
I’ll be curious to get my hands on a copy when the software itself is released. BlogBridge, the parent product, is open-source; there’s no indication on the BlogBridge site that I can find about whether BBL will be distributed that way or not.

Zetoc, the British Library’s electronic Table of Contents service, now offers table of contents RSS feeds for a vast number of online journals. Available to Zetoc members only, this new service is described in the May 2006 D-Lib Magazine. For subscribers, the RSS feed links you to the British Library’s document delivery service as well as to an institutional OpenURL resolver for locally licensed versions of the articles.
Ah, to be in England….

In an earlier post (Geotagging, posted on 17 June 2005), I talked about an extension to RSS that would allow for encoding of geographic metadata into an RSS feed.
GeoNames RSS to to GeoRSS Converter takes this one logical step further. The GeoNames service takes an RSS feed, searches each entry for recognizable geographical locations, and returns a feed with the appropriate geographical metadata added on. And if you then view the feed through a GeoRSS newsreader (as the GeoNames web site points out, there aren’t many of these; they suggest the ACME GeoRSS Reader), you get a map with the locations of the item being discussed in the RSS entries.
This is perfect for news feeds — get a map of the world with the locations of the each news item shown on screen. As an example, take a look at today’s Reuters news. You can see where in the world the news is happening.
On a smaller scale, it might have great application in a library for local news, genealogical research, community events, and so forth. Let people pull up a map of events and pick the ones closest to their houses. Very neat stuff!

FeedRinse is a web-based service that lets you filter your feeds. For the price of a free registration, you can filter up to five RSS feeds. For $4 or $6 a month, you get to filter more feeds and do more with them, depending on the level of your subscription.
Each filter can be fairly complex — feeds that match (or don’t match) a given keyword, tag, or author. So you could search the New York Times’ headlines feed for all entries that contain the word “Washington” but don’t contain the word “Congress” and are written by your favorite reporter. Your filtered feed list can then be exported as an OPML file and read in your favorite aggregator. (The filtered feeds are redirected through FeedRinse.)
What seems to be lacking from the service at present is a way to easily apply the same filter to many different feeds. But as Steve Matthews points out in his blog post on this subject, you can use other services such as RSSMix to do the building of a single feed, which then could be filtered through FeedRinse.

Once again, Paul Pival at Distant Librarian has scooped me on a truly cool use of RSS to improve library service.
Paul wrote about Intuitive Revelations: The Ubiquitous Reference Model in AltRef, Brian Matthews’ blog. In his article, Brian describes an experiment he conducted at Georgia Tech. The experiment followed 40 Georgia Tech students’ blogs. He subscribed using Bloglines and set uph keyword searches for words such as “library,” “assignment,” and similar terms. When he found blog entries related to the students’ academic needs, he posted comments in their blog pointing them toward useful resources.
Brian concludes, in part:

Isn’t that what librarianship is all about?

Over at the Alternative Teen Services blog is an informative summary of public libraries using various “library 2.0” tools to attract and communicate with teen audiences. Also listed links to libraries using pod- and vod-casts.
If your library’s audience includes this younger set (and even for university libraries whose students are a bit older) — take note. These technologies are the way your next generation of library users (i.e., people paying, one way or another, for the library) is familiar with communicating.

The January 2006 web version of RefWorks has a new feature for citing weblog entries. Under the site’s Search menu is a new tool for RSS feeds. Using this tool, you give it an RSS feed and then select which items in that feed you want to build citations for. It gives you the author, title, permanent URL, full text abstract from the RSS feed, along with fields for other information important for citing something as ephemeral as some blog posts can be (such as date accessed). Citations of weblogs can now be handled by RefWorks just like any other source.

A post on TechCrunch (“FeedXS – RSS for Everyone“) pointed me to FeedXS. This is a new service that claims to make it simple for anyone to create an RSS feed. While blog tools are common, this lets you generate a feed without a blog via either a simple web form or MSN Messenger. Although this sort of service can easily be kludged together using a basic web form and tools like the XML::RSS Perl module, it requires some programming skills to do so. FeedXS offers free personal accounts and for-fee business accounts; it’s not clear to me where not-for-profits fall into their pricing mix.
While many libraries are jumping right in to the blogosphere, some others may not want to bother with yet another web site to maintain. Or there might be short-term special purpose feeds that don’t need the overhead of a full-fledged weblog. Weekly questions for a reading group could be posted this way, or perhaps “fun facts about the library” — something that interested patrons would like to see and could add to their aggregators.

Wayne Graham, in a post titled RSS Information Visualization, describes a Java applet he developed to show, in visual fashion, the links between blog tags and content. See the graph of his blog (it will take a few moments for the applet to load — be patient).
For his blog, each article is linked to each category in which it appears. From the map that’s generated, it’s easy to see that he writes mostly about XML and Cold Fusion, but also covers a wide range of topics. He describes the method he uses to generate the map in his posting.
A couple library-specific uses for this sort of tool come to mind. First is a book review blog — with genre or subject area as the tags, and individual reviews as the blog posts. It would be easy for a patron to ‘surf’ the map, looking for books in a subject. More often reviewed books could show up more prominently (other mapping technologies I’ve seen draw heavier lines depending on the strength or frequency of the relationship). Another would be even bigger — the library catalog itself, with subject headings (or, for bookstores like Amazon that have enabled tagging, user tags) as the subjects and items linked from there. This would be, as Wayne notes, a more sophisticated version of the tag cloud we’re all all becoming familiar with.