Imagine my surprise earlier this week when I went to the Multnomah County Library Catalog and found a big, bright orange RSS icon.
They’ve rolled out III’s RSS product, and have 15 feeds coming out of the catalog:
- Audiobooks,
- Children’s fiction
- Cookbooks
- DVDs
- Fiction
- Gardening books
- Graphic novels
- Music
- Mysteries
- Non fiction
- Science fiction
- Teen fiction
- Teen graphic novels
- Travel books
- Picture books/ easy readers
I subscribed to a half-dozen feeds in Bloglines to see how many subscribers are listed (not that this figure is the be all, end all) and found that DVDs is the most popular feed with 34 subscribers. Other feeds have 4-10 subscribers.
I like that they are promoting their RSS feeds in a prominent place. I also like the nice What is RSS? page they’ve put together.
Gripes? Ideally patrons would be able to create their own feeds for specific searches (like aadl.org) but, to my knowledge, this isn’t a feature available from III. I’m guessing that most “2.0″ solutions coming from vendors will be watered down like this. I’d be more than willing to eat my words though!
Having the feeds available is a great first step, and I hope to see MCL take further action integrating the library into the community by helping other organizations get feeds displayed on their websites.
4 Comments
For what it’s worth: Plone (thus Plinkit) does create an RSS feed for any (website) search. Now if only there was a Plone version of Koha! ;-)
Last year, I tried to explain to a III rep why they needed to add dynamic RSS feeds from search results, but the response I kept getting was, “I don’t understand why you would want that.” This after four years of trying to get them to understand why they should do RSS in the first place. I’m not holding out hope, but I’d love to be pleasantly surprised.
You know, as a patron now, you can submit functionality requests to your home library…. ;-)
Hello,
It is my understanding that dynamic RSS feeds will be available in the upcoming release of the III catalog. Currently, library users can create customized searches aka preferred searches that send e-mail notification when new items are added. I understand that these preferred searches will be available as feeds next release.
We’ll see.
@Donna,
Thanks for the reply! I don’t know in what capacity you’re responding, but I appreciate a follow-up from MCL whatever the case! As a librarian and patron I’ll be awaiting the next release.
@Jenny,
All I can say is “Ahhh vendors (at least the majority of them)!” :)