RSS Feeds for Individual User’s Lists in WorldCat.org

OCLC announced today that “Public WorldCat lists are available as RSS feeds that can be monitored using any RSS-capable service or software.” When you view a user’s list within WorldCat.org, you will be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for that list — so whenever that user adds an item to it, you’ll find out.
Libraries that use WorldCat.org lists to generate reading lists on various topics can now embed those lists easily and automatically on library web pages — and let their patrons know, at the same time, that there are new items of interest.
So, for example, I’ve created a brief list of books about RSS. You can subscribe to its feed at http://worldcat.org/profiles/varnumk/lists/53691/rss. Whenever I add a new item to the list, you’ll know. If you go to my list in WorldCat (it’s called "RSS4Lib RSS List"), the RSS link OCLC provides redirects you to AddThis.com, a site that provides one-click subscription or one-click bookmarking links to a wide range of RSS aggregators and social bookmarking services.

What Happens When You Blog

The February 2008 issue of Wired magazine offers an interactive graphical depiction of what happens to your blog post once you click the publish button. "The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You" shows all the interactions between the blogger, the aggregator, spam blogs, and (the whole point, right?) the reader. The Flash graphic depicts all these interactions and makes somewhat clearer how your post gets to wherever it’s ultimately consumed.

Law Library of Congress — RSS Feeds

The Library of Congress’s Law Library of Congress now offers RSS Feeds on the following topics: News & Events, Research Reports, Webcasts, and Global Legal Monitor.
The “Research Reports” feed, for example, includes such topics as “How to Do Russian Legal Research” and “Children’s Rights: International Laws.”
These new feeds are just a small portion of the complete list of Library of Congress RSS Feeds.

Library Blog Aggregator

What if your library provides so many RSS feeds your patrons can’t keep track of them? The University of Alabama in Huntsville built a nice tool in response to this situation: The UAH Library Feed Aggregator. It pulls together the RSS feeds from the library’s Flickr feed, two library blogs, a Huntsville events feed, the New York Times, and the Huntsville weather forecast.
The site has a very clear layout, making it easy to see what’s recent and what’s old. The library’s aggregator provides a single place for its patrons to see all the news important to its patrons.

[Via the UAH Library Blog.]

LJ Article on Librarians who Blog

Meredith Farkas (Information Wants To Be Free) has an article summarizing her recent survey of the biblioblogosphere in the December 15 issue of Library Journal. In The Bloggers Among Us, she summarizes her findings about who is blogging (by age, librarians over the age 40 are the fastest-growing segment; by professional niche, public service librarians are the most populous segment), and what they blog about (libraries and services, sure, but also hobbies, personal lives — and the intersections among these topics).
The article is a good read and might help librarians convince a skeptical management that not only are library and librarian blogs increasingly common, but they are often viewed (in academic circles, where such things matter more) as publications. As Meredith notes, “Blogging can be a great leveler, too. People are judged more by their ideas than their résumés, so anyone can make a name for him/herself. Also, blogging can build a bridge for those geographically isolated from other (or like-minded) librarians.” I would add, blogging can also build a bridge from the library to the geographically isolated patron.

Inaugural Issue of Code4Lib Journal

As a member of the editorial board for the just-launched Code4Lib Journal, I’m pleased to point the way to the inaugural issue. The Code4Lib Journal covers the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future. The idea for the journal came out of last year’s Code4Lib conference, but the journal’s content comes from across the spectrum of libraries.
The first issue of this OPENACCESS journal contains:

If you’re interested in contributing to a future issue, please see the Call for Submissions. We’re accepting proposals for articles, book & software reviews, code snippets & algorithms, conference reports, opinion pieces, etc.

FeedJournal

FeedJournal is a service that turns RSS feed into printable PDF documents formatted like newspapers. At present, there is a free version that converts a single RSS feed into a newspaper-like PDF file. There will soon be paid versions that will allow subscribers to create PDFs out of multiple feeds. The tool is still under active development.
I asked for a reviewers’ account of FeedJournal; Jonas Martinsson was kind enough to provide one to me. FeedJournal organizes feed items into newspaper-like pages. For a sample of how the RSS4Lib site looks (for the period from October 22-December 10, 2007), see RSS4Lib in PDF (433 KB). I also tested the multiple-feed version with four weblogs (PDF, 189KB). This RSSpaper contains four items from each webblog’s feed: RSS4Lib, Librarian.net, Library Stuff, and Information Wants to Be Free.

The newspaper format — multiple columns with articles spreading across one or more — is easy to read and highly portable. A printed PDF is even more portable than Google Reader’s “offline” version; no laptop required. I can see this being a great tool for libraries to make easily-printed handouts of RSS feeds for subject guides, current alerts from databases, and so on. It also seems this might be a good way for librarians to show busy administrators all the good stuff that’s out in the blog world.

My only quibble with FeedJournal is the organizational scheme it imposes on the feeds. It’s a bit idiosyncratic, apparently based on fitting the blog posts into the fewest pages, not by relative freshness of the items or estimated importance. For example, because I liveblogged the ASIS&T Annual Meeting, I had an uncharacteristically large number of longer posts. The result is that the first page of the RSS4Lib PDF comprises one conference session and one short item I wrote several weeks later. Page 2 is the 3rd conference post. Page 3 contains the start of the 2nd conference post (which is continued on page 9). The 4-blog version has similar oddities; each page has posts from throughout the last several weeks.

Of course, FeedJournal is a pre-release product so some oddities are to be expected. I hope, though, that a future version, if not the release, will combine freshness with some estimate of importance (using Technorati, for example, to boost the most linked-to items to the front page). Having an easy-to-print and easy-to-read document is a definite plus.

EBSCO and RSS Alerts

Paul Pival learned something interesting about EBSCO, EZProxy, and RSS feeds: if you don’t edit your EZProxy configuration just so, RSS alerts for saved searches in EBSCO databases get rewritten to pass through your library’s proxy server. And if that happens, off-campus users (including aggregators like Bloglines or Google Reader) can’t get to the RSS feed. (The link to each new item from the database in the feed is still routed through your proxy server so your patrons can still get to the full text at a single click.)
See the Distant Librarian for instructions. In short, all that’s needed is adding a single line to Useful Utilites’ standard EBSCO EZProxy configuration:

NeverProxy rss.ebscohost.com

I suppose other databases require similar proxy configuration changes. If you have examples, leave them in the comments.

Waiter, There’s a Diacritic in My Feed

How to best encode characters with diacritics in your RSS feed? That was the question posed in a thread on Web4Lib recently, started by a librarian working putting his new books list into an RSS feed. (A great idea in itself, of course.) Since many books, especially in an academic library, but also in other libraries with user communities speaking diverse languages, this is important — you want to be able to show the title properly, especially to speakers of the language for whom you’ve bought the book.
There are, of course, several ways to encode many diacritic marks (HTML character entities and Unicode, for example); finding the best one for RSS engendered some discussion.
The consensus in the discussion was that using character references is the best solution, particularly for the item title, which is arguably the most important part of an RSS item to get right (OK, the URL is also critical). If users cannot understand the title, why would they click to the full text?
Character references take the form 

Ӓ

The numbers refer to the actual character; “402” is a ƒ or “florin”; “247” is a ÷ or division symbol. And so on… For a list of common character references, see this entities table.