[Web4lib] RSS usage

[Ryan Eby]

Subscriptions and userbase may vary, but once you have this ability there I 
think you are opening the doors for other possibilities and is well worth 
your time. The important thing is not to just think of this in "aggregator" 
terms but in content syndication. 

For example, our campus network admins have set up the service alerts into RSS 
feeds. (server outages, maintenance, etc.). I happen to work in a library 
department that does tech support and will likely be including this 
information on our department site (it's also on our intranet). It's also 
used to put the alerts right on the sites they affect. Without the RSS feeds 
this would have been much more difficult to do.

Also, once your library has these feeds available it will allow instructors to 
put searches and content right into online courses, personal webpages and the 
like. You can use them yourself to show related books on a topic of the 
month, etc. It has the potential of pushing your presence quite a bit. I'm 
currently working on a few portal and intranet sites that will likely 
leverage some of the feeds out there. Unfortunately we don't have our own 
feeds yet but in the future we might.

I could probably think up some better examples and I'll try to write up a blog 
post when I get the chance so I can include some screenshots (most of my work 
is internal right now). The important thing is to get the word out that this 
content is available.

And I just came across this the other day, and others might find it useful. If 
you want to include RSS content on your site but don't want to go to the 
hassle of parsing it yourself you can use a Feed2JS service such as the one 
below.

http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/

Ryan Eby

On Tuesday 07 June 2005 12:00 pm, David Walker wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> At Cal State San Marcos we are thinking about utilizing RSS in a big way
> with a module that can create on-demand feeds for any journal,
> newspaper, or user conducted search via our federated search system.
>
> It all sounds very cool.  But my question is this:  Does anyone have a
> sense of how many users in academic libraries are actually taking
> advantage of RSS?  I've done an informal survey of a few faculty and
> students here, and most don't even know what RSS is, let alone use it.
>
> 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?
>
> Are we better off focusing our efforts on the dozens of other projects
> we could be working on?
>
> --Dave
>
> =================
> David Walker
> Web Development Librarian
> Library
> Cal State San Marcos
> 760-750-4379
> =================
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-- 
Ryan Eby
Library Distance Learning Services