Case Studies – Libraries’ Use of RSS Feeds

The main focus of the case studies for this week was on libraries that list RSS feeds leading from very specific parts of their website-blog.

As an aside, a caution is evident for anyone using a blog for official reasons, as for a library—be sure the text has no mistakes before you post it—it does not make a good impression on readers if there is a mistake/typo (such as I noticed on the Hennepin County Library blog).

I experimented with leaving the RSS feeds page in each case, and seeing how easy it is to navigate to it from a main page of the website-blog. In the case of the Hennepin County Library, I could not find the path back to the RSS feeds page even though the path had been displayed at the top of that page (even a search in the search box did not lead back to the page). I wonder how a library user would find the feeds?

I feel that feeds are being overdone, overly detailed. For example, in the Hennepin CL site, the subject guide, booklist, events & classes, and news feeds might be useful (though I would think that events and news would be better combined); the “catalogue news & search tips” is probably not a popular choice of a feed, and would be better combined with a general news feed. The “My Account” feed would be useful if it alerted you about holds coming available and about books coming due soon; these services are already provided by some libraries by automatic emails.

The idea behind having many feeds, with specific subjects, is to cater to particular needs and interests, and not to overload the user. But perhaps the user will be overloaded by the crowd of individual feeds subscribed to.

The idea of making a catalog search into a custom feed would be useful for keeping up to date with what is being written in a particular field of interest. This feed option should explain that it is only for subject searches (it would not make sense otherwise). This is similar to a current contents awareness program offered by databases, with notifications sent automatically to email addresses. The North Harris Montgomery Community College District provides just this service, through its current contents feeds from specific journals—from a database that draws from multiple journals would be more useful.

Western Kentucky University Libraries seems quite casual in its tone, with more programming than is usual at a university. The many feeds from the home page are for many blogs of varying style and format, not holding together in the style of the university’s main blog. The feed breakdowns into Coming Events, Current Events, and Part Events (who would want this one?) seem like overkill. Old Stuff and News Stuff feeds are very vague, and not fitting for the academic setting. The university is trying to use the blogs and feeds for social purposes, to reach out to students on a personal basis, separate from academics. To me, they do not fit in with a university library website.

The University of Oklahoma Libraries’ use of RSS feeds to new titles is quite clever—connected to the LC classification system, and broken down into specific subject areas within that system, making for a feed similar to that from a customized search. I would imagine that this service would be of particular interest to faculty.

An examination of the Kansas City Public Library blog includes a look at RSS/XML feeds, but goes far beyond that. I was very impressed by the tremendous amount of research on the part of the library staff that has gone into producing the rich detail of this blog. The 47 categories of subject guides are broken down into many sub-categories, and each main category can be chosen as an RSS feed of new titles. In addition, there are many other guides: for example, the Local History guides have many sections, with biographies, links between guides, subject searching in the guides, links to the OPAC for sources. These serve as online pathfinders to materials. There is also a listing of a large number of external links on each page, specific to the subject area of that page. I feel this blog, with its guides, categories, links, and feeds, is a tremendous success.