Library Web Chic

RSS & the OPAC

There has been a lot of discussion about RSS feeds and the OPAC this week. Catalogablog, Librarian.net, Library Stuff and the Shifted Librarian all were excited about the potential of RSS feeds being included in the new Dynix system. Unfortunately, it seems that it was not to be.
The SPL is offering RSS feeds from their catalog but is seems that this
is a creation of the systems librarians at SPL. They in turn have
offered their creation to other Horizon libraries.

I've been working on similar things for the ALEPH system. Those of
you
who attended Internet Librarian may have seen a demo of my work during
my presentation there. Currently, I am working on trying to merge items
that a patron has on interlibrary loan with items a patron has checked
out from the library in a single RSS feed. I've also been working on
RSS feeds of persistent searches in the OPAC. This has been a slow
process and it would be so much better if such things came “out of the
box” as part of these systems or at least had an easy to integrate API.
However, this has yet to be the case. So, it seems that librarians
are just going to have to do this themselves. At least those of us who
are working on this are willing to share this with others. My congrats
to the SPL. I just wish I had got it done first.