Week 5: Vendors & RSS

 When I was telling my supervisor at my co-op about RSS and vendors for my readings this week, she automatically responded enthusiastically. The way she saw it, she said that it would be really useful if instead of having to go through catalogues from vendors about new books and subscription news, the RSS would provide this information instantaneously.

Therefore, libraries could be up to date with vendors and whatever news comes from them and not have to spend hours on end with numerous vendor catalogues. If a library is subscribed to a number of products from a particular vendor, then this would be a really good way to keep track of their products that are such an investment of most library budgets! 

On Engineering Village, the new RSS service will allow users to customize the feeds they receive which will allow them to review the literature as quickly as it becomes available. Similarily on ProQuest, subscribers are now going to be able to use up-to-date articles on a library interface. In both cases, the intent is to provide up-to-date content from vendor to consumer to more efficiently use the product. These are really simple and useful ways for RSS to bring information to libraries. If the library decides to create an interface for RSS feeds on their homepage, any one who is checking the library site regularly will be able to see what is available.  

At the U of A library belonging to a consortium has obvious advantages, but for RSS, users can expand their information hub to include any or all of the 36 libraries in the consortium. There are also feeds available by second level LC classification, which would be particularly handy in subject specific libraries. To cater to grad students, faculty and researchers, these LCC RSS feeds would keep the masses up to date in their field. What a convenient and time saving device! Hopefully these feeds will become common across all universities in the near future. It would certainly help subject specialist librarians in academic libraries as well as their patrons.