By now you’ve surely seen Jenny’s post regarding SIRSI integrating RSS into their Rooms product (note: not their ILS). And surely you’ve read Sarah’s link to it and Michael’s challenge (which I second here) as well.
I don’t mean to just provide you another link to her post, but I would like to reprint a comment left on that post*:
I work for yet another library automation company. I’ve propsed [sic] a few different RSS ideas to others I work with and the general response I get is “where are the customers who want this?” which is a very important question to answer when working in an agile development environment.
So I ask you, where do I find customers (librarians) who want this?
Brad ClarkeHe has a point that is sometimes difficult to remember. There are still many, many people that aren’t familiar with RSS. Ask your neighbor what “Really Simple Syndication” is. 98% of you will come back having received strange looks, and maybe 1% of you (likely less) will have the correct answer.**
I’m afraid that we won’t get RSS into our OPACs until the vendors know that Joe and Jane Public are using it. Best case scenario is that vendors listen to our pleas, ask us what we want from RSS in our ILS and build it. We get to display feeds of searches as HTML on our websites and no longer have to type in titles for our “What’s New at the Library” lists. We educate our patrons about a developing technology*** with which they’re not familiar (helping them and giving us TechCred in the process). We help them create feeds about topics they fancy, and for their overdue notices as well.
But what if RSS does take off in a major way? Don’t you think that it is going to be ruined? If not by some new fangled spam, then it’ll be by the abundant adverts and few full-content feeds. It could be rendered as painful to use as email. In 20 years, Steven’s daughter will be running around telling people that “RSS is a dead technology” just like what he loves to say about email (partially because he believes it and partially, I think, because he likes to get a rise out of those who hear it).
*If you operate solely in RSS land you could have missed it. I would have if I hadn’t gone to her site to get this permalink.
**The missing 1%? You’ll come back with a black eye.
***PubLibs walk the fine line between pushing new technologies on their patrons, and guiding them through technologies they might benefit from learning about.
updated to fix my bad HTML
