Counterweight to snark, examples of good design and design resources over at Librarian Avengers.
Just Hack It. I have to say, if more librarians thought like hackers the world would be a better place. One thing I wonder about all the hoopla about getting RSS integrated into products from vendors is how much is it going to cost individual libraries? What exactly are vendors going to charge for it, because I doubt they will give away added features for free (I’d be thrilled to be proved wrong on this point though).
If the RSS feature is buried in a “Context Management System,” how many libraries wanting RSS are going to be able to afford it? And why place something important like RSS support in a Library vendor’s hands? Is there going to be a digital divide when it comes to RSS support in libaries, simply because the well-funded libraries will be able to pay the vendors for feeds?
Technically, if you already have an opac like Innovative’s which supports static URLS for search results, why couldn’t you already get some kind of RSS feed even if only by screenscraping and running a program that will convert the HTML the catalog page produces into a feed? That might end up with an ugly feed, but it might work. Or do the whole thing by setting up queries as Dorothea suggests? I have no idea though, I don’t really know how to program. Maybe I should take some classes…..
2:23 pm on February 9th, 2005 1
Screenscraping just bugs me on some unaccountable but probably aesthetic level… What about Z39.50, for the most academic libraries and few public libraries that make Z39.50 access available? I’m thinking that there’s got to be some way of using Z39.50 to create a general convert-to-RSS script, that can then be tweaked to each library…
7:25 pm on February 9th, 2005 2
Oh, I think that Z39.50 would be a much better solution, that’s what Dorothea was proposing. I just thought that screenscraping might be annother option if for whatever reason Z39.50 wouldn’t work. There are a bunch of screenscraping html to RSS resources out there on the web, so it seems to already be documented fairly well.