More Good Stuff from Ann Arbor District Library

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.]

Campus Wikis and Wiki Authority

Case Western Reserve University’s CaseWiki caught my eye in this article. The school published a wiki that any authorized Case user may edit (visitors may leave comments). Topics include people, academics, organizations, social life (activities, bars, restaurants, theaters, etc.). It looks to be developing into an all-purpose guide to life at CWRU.
Like so many bottom-up tools, CaseWiki relies on the self-correcting power of the population contributing to it. It’s not anonymous, so there’s reputation at stake (like in the blog world). This raises a question that occurred to me during the recent NEASIS&T “Buy, Hack, or Build” conference: what is the minimum number of participants a wiki needs to be self-correcting and (I hesitate to use this word to a librarian audience) “authoritative”? It seems to me that a small number of wiki participants — say, fewer than a dozen — lends itself to groupthink too easily. Large wikis — the Wikipedia, for example — are self correcting. Where’s the threshhold between the two? A few dozen users? A few score?
Your thoughts are welcome in the comments section…

[Via The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog.]

Google Base & RSS

Google Base, Google’s public-access database for whatever you’ve got, has at least one feature that’s interesting from this blog’s perspective: it accepts input in the most common RSS formats (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 ). This according to the Google Base frequently asked questions.
Some blog tools — I’m thinking of WordPress in particular — use MySQL as a back end so already have the database aspect covered. But if you’re using an RSS format as a way to get your data, whatever it is, from application 1 to application 2, and there’s a need to have that data searchable, letting Google Base import the data seems like a viable solution.
For run-of-the-mill blog content, of course, this isn’t really an advantage; plenty of search engines, Google’s included, handle weblog content admirably. But for other stuff that’s publicized by RSS — bibliographic records of recently acquired books, new journal articles in a given subject area, and the like — there might be some interesting uses.
Anyone doing anything with this who wants to share? Drop me a line…

[Via Really Simple Syndication, Dave Winer’s blog.]

Polaris Joins the RSS Bandwagon

Another LMS joins the RSS fray. According to an excerpt from a document on Polaris Systems‘ extranet, their forthcoming PowerPAC 3.2 release has some basic RSS features built in:

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a method of publishing links to content on your Web site. In Polaris PowerPAC 3.2, patrons can set up RSS feeds for new titles from Polaris PowerPAC directly to a Web site such as My Yahoo! or Bloglines. When the feed is received, the patron can click the link on the Web site to see a list of new titles in your library catalog. Polaris PowerPAC is RSS 2.0 compliant. Processing for the RSS feed is related to Polaris PowerPAC’s New Titles dashboard feature. Automatic processing for the New Titles Web part occurs nightly, and the dashboard links contain new titles for the past 31 days. On-order items are included. For the RSS feed, Polaris background processing updates the current New Titles list hourly.

Another small step forward…

[Via Library Planet.]

Blog as Library Home Page

Welcome to the out-of-the-box content management revolution, Meadville Public Library! While not the first library to use weblog software as the underpinnings for a library web site, MPL has done a very nice job designing a clean, easy-to-use, and attractive library web site using WordPress. The home page and library departments are dynamic, using the weblog as the source of the content — library news and information — and secondary pages (Ask a Librarian, policies, etc.) are static. But all managed by the weblog software.
I was particularly struck by the Children’s Room, one of the library’s departments, has a much more colorful and entertaining design than the home page, as befits the part of the library for youngsters. The blog content is links to children’s’ author’s web pages — a clever use of the blog, and something that will clearly draw young reader’s attention more than announcements or library information ever would.
Since it’s a blog, of course, community members can subscribe to the latest news from the main, children’s, fiction, and “main floor” (new books) via their favorite aggregator.

[Via nerdcore.]

Monitor This: Metasearch with RSS Feeds

Tired of checking all your favorite search engines and aggregators for the latest news on a given topic? MonitorThis, a beta service, has a solution. Enter your search and it will provide you an OPML file (which you can then import into your aggregator or feedreader of choice). For aggregators that let you put a bunch of feeds into a single folder, I’d recommend doing so — MonitorThis gives you one feed for each service. One obvious way to improve the service would be to have MonitorThis perform the aggregation and provide a single feed for a user to subscribe to.

[Via RSS-Specifications.]

Short-Lived, Special-Purpose Weblogs

Steve Lawson blogged Internet Librarian 2005 and highlighted a very clever use of the weblog. While many libraries use blogs and RSS for library news and announcements, the Virginia Commonwealth University’s libraries set up a short-term weblog for Black History Month this past February. In the weblog, the librarians highlighted items in their collections, resources on the Internet, images from their special collections, and events around the country in observation of BHM.
Special-purpose, short-term blogs are a simple tool for drawing attention to events or topics of short-term interest; with a small investment of time and resources (in terms of staff time to set up and maintain the blog, as well as add content) and a bit of planning, a library could easily generate feeds for other campus or local organizations highlighting the ‘good stuff’ the library offers on a given topic or event.

[Via Steve Lawson’s See Also… weblog, where he reported on the conference.]

Shockwave Audio and Weblogs

The Neef Law Library blog at Wayne State University is using Shockwave audio files to record blog content. A slightly different form of podcasting, but it works very nicely without the ‘pod’ or iTunes. It uses ClassCaster as the underlying technology.

I gather that the ultimate use of this will be to podcast courses, the Neef librarians are testing it with other content. And since it uses Shockwave, a fairly common browser plug-in, it’s pretty universally accessible.

Correction: 4 November 2005: Elmer at Content let me know, very nicely, that I didn’t do my research very well!

By way of correction, we are not using Shockwave to record podcasts. We are embedding a Flash MP3 player object in the post to play the audio, but the recording is done using a telephone connection or by uploading locally recorded MP3s. We are using the open source Musicplayer at the moment, but are developing our own player that is more tuned to playing single MP3s from a blog post.

Thanks for the correction.

Weblog Usability: Tips from Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen, the well-known usability guru, offers a list of the “Top Ten Design Mistakes” for weblogs. There’s lots of good stuff here, but the basic item to remember is that weblogs are web sites. Even if you’re using an authoring tool (Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, etc.), it’s incumbent on you as a weblog author to provide information on who you are, to stick to your topic, to publish regularly, and to construct meaningful links.

Making a Feed Where None Exists

If a site provides an RSS feed, it’s easy to grab it for whatever purpose. (Perhaps too easy — as the blogger at RSS Specifications points out, echoing Tim Bray’s serious concerns.) But I digress.
What if the site you visit hasn’t created its own RSS feed yet?
Several tools exist to meet this purpose. One I’ve just been clued in to (thanks Nick) is called FeedTier. Give it a web page and it will do its best to parse the page into content and fluff and create an RSS feed of the content. In a few trials, it did pretty well, though it erred on the side of omitting good content rather than providing unwanted fluff.