Sending My Love in RSS

LITA Forum presentation: Currency, Convenience, and Access
Karen G. Schneider presents Jenny Levine’s presentation on RSS. Can you really find a better combination? I think not.

RSS has been the driving force behind the explosion of blogs. RSS can replace those old email listservs. They are easier to manage because you do not have to maintain the list, there is a minimal to no set-up fee, and subscribers manage their own intake.

Karen recommends Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom by Hammersley, published by O’Reilly 2005.

(I was interested in this presentation not because I need help understanding RSS, but because I like to see how other people approach this topic. I have done a training session at MPOW on blogs and RSS, but I would like to do another session just on RSS and what it can really do.)

John Law of ProQuest shares the podium with Karen
ProQuest has spent some time building some relevant and useful RSS feeds for libraries and users. ProQuest is developing customizable feeds for keyword searching. (my heart does a pitter pat) There is the ability to authenticate users once they go from the RSS feed to the database, housed within the library. A custom feed will pick up the authentication and prompts when it is it created.

I can think of many different uses for both the subject feeds they have set up and for the keyword feeds. When I am able to create a dynamic subject blog at MPOW, I can use these feeds to find new information for the blog with little to no work on my part.

Karen gets back up and shows us what we can do with feeds. You can:

  • get new information from a website
  • get a list of new books from a library catalog in a particular subject
  • keep a list of the books I have requested from the library
  • make your content easier to find and share
  • grab book articles for your library site (like book reviews)
  • create aggregator subscriptions to publish on different sites
  • get table of contents of particular journals
  • insert any of the above information onto a blog, website, or into courseware, like WebCT

To build and run feeds, Karen recommends Feed2JS if you can not run your feed on your own server.

–Jane, almost time for going home