RSS and Health Sciences

I find the RSS capability especially intriguing with the increasing use of Blackberries, PDAs, iPods, and MP3 player capabilities. I had no idea it existed so forgive my ignorance.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or RDF Site Summary) is a broadcast service to subscribers by providing updates on new acquisitions, library events, exhibits, and other important information. The library can also harvest sites of interest to the reader through links.

Though limited to headlines and minimal text, updates can be sent to PDAs and cell phones to disseminate information (Boss, 2006). Advantages include: information is fed when it is available and no searched for, privacy is assured, SPAM is not possible, and feeds can be cancelled with only a few keystrokes. RSS 2.0 is the easiest to use and and RSS icon can easily be added to a Web page. Both directories and aggregators are available for identifying RSS feeds. If libraries have large acquisitions then it is a good idea to group new acquisitions into broad subjects group. Feedreader and Bloglines are open source free products that are aggregators to read the feed.

Boss, R. W. (2006, March 17). Libraries and rss. Retrieved June 25, 2008 from http://www.ala.org/ala/pla/plapubs/technotes/LibrariesandRSS.pdf