Ed Vielmetti let me know that the Ann Arbor District Library catalog and blog combination is up and running.
You can browse the catalogablog (with apologies to David Bigwood) without a login. Library staff post books to the blog, and library patrons can add their own comments. Blogs are provided, at this writing, for books, audio, and video, with breakdowns by age within each section. All subscribable, of course, by RSS.
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 Rhode Island Office of Library and Information Services offers Rhode Island-wide library news and information via its Rhodarian blog. From their site:
According to the Oh!Libraries (Ohio Libraries) blog, similar services are offered by at least four other states’ libraries: Idaho, Indiana, Utah, and Ohio.
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.).
Things You Can Do with RSS is a wiki for discussing just what the title says. While it’s not written from a library perspective, it is nonetheless a great thought-starter and source for things to borrow.
The librarians at the University of Pennsylvania maintain a Library RSS Feed Generator. The main page of this site lists subject areas for which there are research guides (with the most recently updated on top). Each entry on the home page provides links to specific resources, a link to the RSS feed for that list, and a link to all the guides within a broader subject area.
For example, the History category has both an overall RSS feed for guides in history as well as individual feeds for guides to articles, historical image collections, and databases of print advertisements.
Even better, the librarian who curates each guide is listed by name, with an email address and last-updated date displayed on the web page.
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!
Innovative Interfaces provides more details about their new RSS capabilities, according to a press release published earlier this week and discussed in an earlier RSS4Lib posting.
The new RSS tools will be included in the 2006LE version of Millennium, scheduled for release in late 2005. According to the press release, there are two significant RSS tools:
Perhaps I was too pessimistic in my previous post; if Millenniuim keeps to its release schedule, this will be available sooner than I thought.
Now if only Innovative would add an RSS feed to their press releases page…
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.
