I’m not sure what to think about Sirsi supporting RSS. I am finding myself a little underwhelmed. Partly because the RSS module seems to be buried in Sirsi Rooms and the Enterprise Portal Watchamacallit. Some other people have questions about this too.
Tying RSS to a library vendor content management system doesn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to do — it would certainly be nice to get feeds from a federated search product as well as be notified when a new internet resource has been added to a subject research guide. But I get a little uneasy with the thought that so much content (catalog, federated search product, web page content management system) is coming from one vendor. Having things work together is nice, but so is local control. Libraries are already balancing contracts with so many companies, the idea of also using a library vendor for web content just gives me the heebie jeebies.

I wonder if the libraries who might want RSS have already invested so much time and energy into their web sites so Sirsi Rooms might not be very attractive to them. Maybe they could take some of the money that would go into buying a product like Sirsi Rooms and train some staff in web programming instead — that seems like a better investment to me.
I hope that some day soon library vendors start offering RSS feeds as enhancements to products that libraries already own instead of bundling RSS in a (probably expensive, I’m guessing) product that would be out of reach or impractical for many libraries.