Week 5: RSS

Since I took one of my one-week vacations from blogging last week, I'll mention a little on RSS in general at the same time before looking at this week's readings. Like a number of other people have posted, I always thought of RSS as something that was potentially interesting, but before this course I had never gotten around to setting up a reader. The few times that I had clicked on RSS feeds in the past, I ended up with some folder in my Firefox browser that I didn't know what to do with. Since getting Google Reader set up, I'm much more excited about RSS feeds. I've noticed some other bloggers noting that RSS is good for sites that are updated constantly, but I've also found it useful for sites that I wouldn't often think to check because they are updated so sporadically.

The use of RSS feeds for search results strikes me as an innovative way to extend the functionality of databases/OPACs. At the library I work for, we've been looking into purchasing a new ILS, and potentially a new discovery layer, so functionality like this is something that we've been interested in.

I think the main problem with RSS feeds for searches is that it has the potential to be misunderstood or overlooked by users who don't understand the technology. It's by no means as obscure to the casual user as boolean searching, but as these discussions have shown, quite a lot of future librarians are new to RSS. If my library had this sort of RSS functionality, I would try to introduce it to users with the most simple introduction I could muster. The article by Randy Reichardt that we looked at this week is a good start, but it still contains a lot of text if someone isn't sure what RSS is, or what it could do for them.