Hennepin County Library talks about subscribing to our 'free' RSS feeds which indicates that maybe sometime in the future there will be a charge for this. Or maybe user's expect to pay for this service already and the library is using the wording to encourage users to subscribe.
I set up a feed from this library's catalogue search page on 'cats' and received the whole page from my screen with both checked in and checked out books. I am not sure why I would want to see the checked in books, but I can understand the seeing when the checked out books were returned. The explanation says that the RSS feeds alerts the user to the books as soon as they become available in the library.. so why would I see those that are presently available.. maybe I am missing something. The subject guides are an impressive list and link to some interesting websites regardless of the RSS feeds.
The Kansas City Public Library also offers RSS feeds to 47 subject guides which are useful in keeping up to date with relevant information. I subscribed to one on new books about Women and there were only 3 items in the feed. It seems that if libraries are posting new books to these feeds then somewhere in the processing of the books, someone is categorizing it under one of the subject headings and new book listings. This is especially apparent for the Tacoma Public Library where I subscribed to the feed on biographies and received 124 items immediately. However, I returned to the feed to check them again and they had disappeared. So I am not sure where they went. This practice of posting new titles as an RSS feed must prove to be a lot of extra work for staff. The list for the new arrivals by category for Tacoma Public Library is very long and one needs to be very selective before subscribing to the RSS feeds. The library also makes this information available online for those who do not wish to use the feeds.
The North Harris Montgomery Community College has set up a series of RSS feeds for students to access journals and keep current on new articles of interest. I could not test this as it is only available to students of the college.
The University of Oklahoma offers RSS feeds for new books based on the library of congress classification subject headings. Users can chose more specific subjects within each broad category. This way of providing information about new books especialy in a university setting makes for a very efficient use of time for both students and staff who usually research only their topics and would waste too much time looking at the 'normal' new book lists where a lot of information would be of no interest to them.
As shown here all types of libraries are using social software more and more to bring information out to the community by setting up blogs with broad community information and also by using RSS feeds to include lists of subject guides and new books. In both cases the search for information must be initiated by the user. In the former on a continual basis by going to the library blog and in the latter only once to set up the feed which is then in control of the provider, the library.
Libraries will continue to be proactive in offering RSS feeds and it will be interesting to see how many users subscribe to receiving information in this format. As the technology increases, the number of users may decrease as they reach the satiation limit of more and more technology and an unwillingness to conquer yet another innovation.
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2 comments:
Hi Jane
Your last comment really made me think about the way technologies can sometimes make our lives easier, while at other times, can create more work while burying us under too much information. Just to refresh, you said [As the technology increases, the number of users may decrease as they reach the satiation limit of more and more technology and an unwillingness to conquer yet another innovation]. I feel like that sometimes. I love technology, and I love what it allows me to do, but I feel less connected to people these days, and a lot more reliant on my computer for communication, which in my opinion is very time consuming.
I am also curious as to how the growth of RSS feeds will affect websites. If people are not actually visiting the site,then from a financial standpoint, bare-bones might be better than all the bells and whistles. Another consideration is the loss of advertising dollars. Perhaps those with RSS feeds will need start charging a fee for the service.
Hi Jane,
I think you made a very good comment about the fact that libraries will need to be proactive to let users know of their RSS feeds and encourage users to actually take advantage of them--it will indeed be interesting to see how successful they are.
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