RSS

I’ve known for a long time that RSS could be very useful but hadn’t taken the time to set anything up yet (so, thank you Amanda). It’s great now to have the basics and also to know about things like Newsisfree, integrating email and RSS, and using alerts in Proquest and EBSCO. RSS seems really flexible and easy to use.

I knew that alerts were available but hadn’t looked into them yet, because I’m pretty lazy about learning new technology/software. It is therefore people like me that I usually have in mind when thinking about how to set up web pages and show users what’s available.

So, when setting up RSS I think it’s probably important to make it clear from the homepage that RSS is available. Not a lot of the case studies did this, (e.g. Hennepin, Tacoma) so it was difficult to figure out how new users would navigate to those very useful pages that listed all the feeds available

It is also useful if before the list of feeds, there is a brief paragraph explaining what RSS is and how to use it. University of Oklahoma is a good example of this

It’s also worth thinking about how to most usefully create feeds headings. Oklahoma’s division by LC heading is pretty cute! Whereas Western Kentucky seems a bit cluttered, and also has two links to the same feed, one called Make a Suggestion, the other called AskUs Blog. The more clicks that take users to information they’ve seen before, the faster they are going to abandon the site.

Thanks again Amanda for introducing me to yet another very useful item.