[Web4lib] RSS usage

[K.G. Schneider]

> For those who have created RSS feeds for new title lists and other
> library resources -- what is your usage?  Do you advertise or inform
> your faculty and students about RSS in some way?  Do you promote a
> particular reader?

We have had an email list for close to a decade. It now has 16,000 readers,
and has all the problems email lists have--subscribers who get dropped,
whose messages go into spam, who forget what address they are under, etc. We
had our first RSS feed up in January 2004, and then we got our own native
feed a few months later. 

The return on investment is startling. It's always hard to say for sure how
many subscribers you have with RSS, but in Bloglines alone (which we heavily
promote because it's free, easy, and Web-based), we have over 4,000
subscribers. Not only that, but 3.8% of the accesses to are server are now
to our RSS file. Not only that, but 11% of LII users found us in the last
year, and slowly but surely are coming from outside the narrow pool of
librarians who hear about LII through word of mouth or presentations. RSS
has been a terrific outreach tool--finding people where they are, as opposed
to hoping they find us. In terms of maintenance, it has also been, knock on
wood, almost problem-free. At one point, after a server migration, a smaller
feed we maintain got mangled, but it was quickly fixed. Plus I have not had
one case of anyone writing us to say that they didn't like it, had technical
problems they expected us to fix, etc. etc. Mull that over... 

> Are we better off focusing our efforts on the dozens of other projects
> we could be working on?

I can't answer that for you, since I don't know what your estimated time to
completion for this project is (except to note that your question sounds a
*tiny* bit as if it is begging a particular answer), but I'll tell you we
have been returned a thousandfold for what we put into RSS. I've spent far,
far, far more for much, much, much less. We plan to make more use of RSS
next year. In terms of what things cost to do, well, you could spend more
money having meetings about whether to implement RSS than in actually
offering it. *Ahem* not that this ever happens in libraries. 

Note that the key is not to get your users to understand RSS... but to use
it. You don't care if they understand they are getting a valid, well-formed
XML feed yadayadayada as long as they are automagically receiving their new
book lists and whatnot. 

Many people have not heard about RSS, but what is startling is that for a
technology still ironing out its standards, it is being adopted fairly
rapidly. See Pew:

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp

Maybe next year RSS will not be the "thang" any more (although I don't think
so). I don't care. Right now, for negligible overhead, RSS is bringing users
to our site and helping them drink our KoolAid. 

Karen G. Schneider
Director, Librarians' Index to the Internet
http://lii.org kgs at lii.org