RSS - What it is, What it does

And one more, this time about RSS:

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Things you can do with RSS:

1. Display items from an RSS feed on your site. For example, if there’s a source that publishes an RSS feed of the latest petroleum news you could embed those news items in your web site so that whenever users came to your page they would see the latest news headlines. You can do this using an “RSS to HTML” conversion tool like the one at http://feed2js.org/. You give them the location of the XML file of the RSS feed, and they convert it into HTML, javascript, or PHP code that you can add to your website to display the content of the feed.
2. Provide links to your users so that they can subscribe to RSS feeds that were created by other sites. This assumes that you have users who already know what RSS is and why they want it, or that you will provide information somewhere on the page about how to subscribe to an RSS feed. For example, some of the publishers you link to on your TOC page already publish their TOCs as an RSS feed. Your users could find this by browsing around the publisher’s web site, or you could provide a link to the RSS feed directly on your page in the same way ACS does here (http://pubs.acs.org/alerts/rss/index.html). One potential problem is if a site that you link to stops publishing its feed or changes the URL, you won’t know until someone tries to subscribe to the feed and gets a message that says it doesn’t exist anymore. Basically, it’s the same problem one always has when linking to sites outside of your control.
3. Create RSS feeds for your own content. This is useful if you publish information that your users might like to subscribe to. For example, do you send out an email with a list of new library acquisitions? You could also offer a new books RSS feed for those who want to get the content that way. Or you could create an RSS feed for new “In the Spotlight” announcements. Your new catalog system might have the ability to automatically generate RSS feeds of new content. This would be something to check with the programmer about. For your library website, you could use a tool like List Garden (http://www.softwaregarden.com/products/listgarden/), an application that sits on your computer desktop and can be used to make RSS feeds when you don’t have a program that automatically generates them.

I’ve written the following as something you could possibly email to the company when you introduced RSS to give people who don’t know about it an idea of what it can do and how to get started:

Why RSS? And what is it?

When you think RSS, think “Really Simple Syndication,” an easy way to receive news and information from your favorite websites. Do you have a list of websites that you check for new information? Do you find yourself forgetting to check them, or checking them, but finding nothing new? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a personal “newspaper” that would check your favorite sites and bring you all the news in one place, as it’s published? Well, that’s what an RSS reader does.

How to get started reading news the RSS way

Here’s what you need to get started with RSS:

1. An RSS news reader. This is the software that checks the pages and tells you when there’s something new. You might want to try Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) or Google Reader (http://reader.google.com).
2. The RSS feeds from the websites you want to keep tabs on. Some websites still don’t publish an RSS feed, but it’s usually easy to figure out if they do. The next time you’re browsing a website look for an image like this: or this: or this: . Clicking on that link will usually take you to a strange looking page like this: http://apartmenttherapy.com/index.xml That’s the RSS page, and it’s where your news reader gets the information about what’s new on that website. It may look odd to you, but don’t worry. It makes perfect sense to your news reader.
   

First you need to set up your news reader and create an account. Bloglines, for example, will walk you through the process of registering and creating a username and password, so you’ll be able to keep your account private. You’ll usually get an email at the account that you registered with asking you to verify that you want to create the account. Next you’ll need to add the “feeds” you want to follow. These are the RSS pages published by the sites your interested in. When you tell your news reader that you want to add a feed, it will ask you for the URL. This is when you copy and paste the URL that you found on the site you want to follow. Some web sites will give you a button you can click to add their feed to your news reader. For example, this page on CNN’s site has buttons that will automatically add the feed to whichever news reader you use: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss. Once you’ve subscribed to a site you’ll see the newest articles in your RSS reader. As more new articles are published, they’ll show up too, without you ever having to go back to the page that they came from. Most readers have a way to keep an article new, or to save it if you want to read it later. Add the RSS feeds from all the sites you usually check, and pretty soon you’ll be getting a constantly up to date personal newspaper that has exactly the news you want.

Customized Site Search

Another summary written during my corporate library internship:

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Here’s some information about each of the major players in customized site searching. After seeing each of them, I think my recommendation would be to use either Gigablast or Google, Gigablast has the advantage of not requiring you to register to create a custom search, but Google might have more staying power. Swicki is the most interesting, because it lets searchers see what previous users have searched for, but it’s also the one that looks least “professional” in style, so I don’t know how well it would fit in with the look of your library pages.

-Molly

Gigablast (http://www.gigablast.com/cts.html)

• Search is handled through Gigablast’s site and results are returned on a page with your logo. You can also choose to receive results as XML if you want to process the results and customize the look of them further using PHP, etc.
• Search box can be embedded in a page.
• Gigablast gives you HTML code and tells you how to edit it to create your search box.
• An example of a page that uses Gigablast search: http://www.pandia.com/searchworld/gigablast.html
  

Rollyo (http://www.rollyo.com/)

• You create your “searchroll” (list of sites you want to search) through a web interface on Rollyo’s site. This searchroll is public unless you register with Rollyo. Registration only requires giving them your email address. Once you’re a registered user you have the option to make your searchroll private.
• Search box can be embedded in a page
• Results page can’t be customized with your logo. It has a logo for Rollyo at the top as well as ads.
• An example of a site that uses Rollyo: http://rollyo.com/susannek/search_engine_news/

Google Custom Search Engine (http://www.google.com/coop/cse/)

• You must be a registered Google user to create a search.
• There is no way to make your search engine private. It will be listed in the GCSE directory, which will allow people outside of UOP to use it to search.
• You can invite people to contribute sites to be included in the search engine. This seems redundant when you already have a link at the top of the UOP Links page that lets employees email you when they think of new sites that should be included. GCSE also requires contributors to create a Google account if they don’t have one already.
• You can add your logo to the results page, or frame the results in a page on your site.
• An example of a site that uses GCSE: http://www.realclimate.org/

Yahoo Search Builder (http://builder.search.yahoo.com/m/promo)

• You must have a Yahoo ID to create a search engine.
• It seems like there’s no way to have it search multiple sites.

Swicki (http://swicki.eurekster.com/)

• No way to make your Swicki private.
• Displays a tag cloud of search terms under the search box. This tag cloud changes as users do new searches. Users can see what other people have looked for (although not associated with a particular user’s name). This could be a plus or a minus depending on how private your users want to be. Terms that are searched more often will appear larger in the tag cloud.
• An example of a page that uses Swiki search: http://china-auto.blogspot.com/

A Brief Primer on OpenURL, Link Resolvers, and Their Use

For a month before school started I interned at a corporate library in the Chicago suburbs. Part of the job I was tasked with was researching and writing summaries of technologies the library was thinking about implementing. With a few minor edits, here's what I put together for my boss about Open URL and link resolvers:

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This presentation, given by Cindy Trainor at Computers in Libraries 2005, is a comprehensive introduction to what Open URL and link resolvers are and how they work.

Here’s a quick summary from her presentation and other sources:

Why use OpenURL?

Without OpenURL:
A patron searches a source, which may or may not contain links to the target (or the target itself, e.g. fulltext); the patron takes that citation, then searches for the target in the library catalog, ejournal A-Z list, other databases, google, etc.

With OpenURL:
A patron searches a source, usually an Abstracting & Indexing database, and finds citations for items that are needed (targets). In between the sources and targets sits software called a Link Resolver or Link Server that accepts links (openURLs) sent by the sources and presents the user with links to individual targets.

What does an OpenURL look like?

http://ry6af4uu9w.search.serialssolutions.com/?SS_Source=3 &genre=article&sid=ProQ:&atitle=TechnologyTrendsforIntranetLibrarians &title=Online&issn=01465422&date=11/01/2004&volume=28&issue=6 &spage=45&SS_docid=000000735316291&author=DarleneFichter

• BaseURL: http://ry6af4uu9w.search.serialssolutions.com (This means that the library is using Serials Solutions as their link resolver. This could also point to EBSCO’s service, or Elsevier’s, or whichever one the library chose to contract with.)
• Article Title: Technology Trends for Intranet Librarians
• (Journal) Title: Online
• ISSN: 0146-5422
• Date: 11-01-2004
• Vol. 28, Issue 6
• Starting page 45
• Author: Darlene Fichter
  

Once the OpenURL is sent from the search page, what happens next?

The link resolver now checks the library’s knowledgebase (where you’ve told it what subscriptions you have and how far back they go). Most link resolver products will have a web interface where you add the subscription packages and individual journals that you have in your library’s collection. If the data in the knowledgebase is incorrect or incomplete, your users might not be able to get to journals you subscribe to, or they might be presented with a link to a journal that isn’t in your holdings. Most link resolvers will allow you to add your print holdings to the knowledgebase too, so that users will know when you have a print copy in your collection.

Next the link resolver figures out if the OpenURL provided enough information for it to link directly to the article. For example, some journals may require an OpenURL to provide the journal title, article title, volume number, and ISSN in order to create a direct link. Some journals may need all this plus the author’s name to be able to link directly. So, depending on the requirements of a particular journal, users may see some results that link directly to the article level, while some link to the issue level.

How to choose a vendor:

Before you start looking at the specific features the vendors provide, think about two issues:

1. Longevity: Does the vendor have enough customers that they’re going to be in this for the long haul, or will they drop their link resolver as an unprofitable side venture?
2. Accuracy and depth of knowledge base: The vendor with the most customers can probably put the most effort towards keeping the knowledgebase up to date, and the more libraries that use the product, the more people will be reporting errors.

(Summarized from a useful post on the Web4Lib mailing list: http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/web4lib/2005-June/037368.html)

Comparing vendors:

This article from the October 2004 issue of Computers in Libraries provides a comparison chart of all the major link resolver vendors. Several other sites pointed to this as the most thorough comparison out there. The consensus seems to be that ExLibris’s SFX is the most used, followed by Serials Solutions’ ArticleLinker and Endeavor’s LinkFinder.

Watch your step

Jill Hurst-Wahl mentioned this seminar about newspaper digitization on her blog. I might try to sign up, because I think it would tie in with the Illinois Newspaper Project work. Even though the INP is microfilming, not digitizing, I bet a lot of the initial work that has to be done is the same.

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Mi Vida Loca

Ok, so I'm enrolled in the CAS in Digital Libraries this semester. What does this mean? Well, for me it means I'm surrounded by interesting projects. I'm taking two classes and working three jobs, because I just couldn't figure out anything that I wanted to drop. This is going to require a phenomenal organizational effort on my part, I suspect. Perhaps it's time to really get down to the nitty-gritty of implementing a GTD system.

My jobs are:

1. Creating code documentation and managing web site updates for the ECHO-DEP digital preservation research and development project. This is my assistantship and I work there about 20 hours a week. Right now I'm trying to make my way through the existing documentation to get up to speed on the project's progress to date. I'm a little nervous about this job, because I'll be the only non-programmer in a group of programmers, and my ability to understand and describe what they're working on is going to be crucial to my ability to do my job. I've done a lot of work before being the middleman between programmers and non-techies, but it's always hard to get up to speed on a new set of acronyms and technologies.
2. The Illinois Newspaper Project. I'm helping to prepare pre-1970 newspapers for microfilming. This involves noting changes in the masthead and other publication data, like where issue numbers were skipped or where pages are missing in the hard copies. They've started me with a Russian newspaper from around the turn of the century. Is this a clever trick to keep the library students from spending all their time reading the newspapers instead of making notes about them?
3. I'm helping organize and populate a wiki for the Champaign Public Library. They have a grant to create a resource for local business people, and so they're creating the website and a series of seminars that will help people get their businesses off the ground. The focus in on local information, and a lot of the information on the site will come from CPL's "Fugitive Facts," a collection of answers to reference questions the library has received over the years. We're launching the website at the end of February, so there's a lot to do before then. Although fortunately we don't have to have everything done when it launches. We can still flesh it out as the semester goes on.

My classes are:

1. 590MDL: Metadata in Theory and Practice. This class should be a huge help with figuring out the ECHO-DEP job. I'm really looking forward to getting a better handle on the different metadata types and when to use them.
2. 590DEL: Design of Digitally Mediated Information Services. This one will talk about the ways in which Web 2.0-ish tools like blogs, wikis, podcasting, and the like can help libraries do their jobs. Should fit in nicely with my CPL job, and there will be the opportunity to work on related projects too.

So yeah, it's going to be a jam-packed semester, but I'm really looking forward to the challenge of it. I just hope that my petition for the University to change my residency status to in-state goes through. I've been living here for 4.5 years, after all, and it's been 2.5 since the last time I was in school. I really don't want to take out any more student loans!

Welcome to Shelf-ish!

I've created this blog as a place to store my thoughts on libraries, both digital and otherwise. I come from a background that combines experience in traditional book publishing with several years as a web producer for a medical reference website. I completed my Master's in 2004, and took a job with the U of I's library school, helping them start an advanced degree program in digital libraries. I'm now enrolled in that program, with plans to explore the various options digitization provides for connecting with our patrons in new ways.

When thinking about the mission of libraries, I like to remind myself of this quote by John F. Kennedy:

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”