Feeds and Mashups
"Feeds and Mashups: A Healthy Diet of Live Content"
Health Libraries Inc Fifth Annual Conference, October 2007
Presentation by Maxus Australia
What is RSS?
RSS stands for either Really Simple Syndication... or Rich Site Summary... or RDF Site Summary (depending on your point of view!). It's an increasingly common way of giving you control over the amount of information out there on the web. Rather than having to consult each web site and database in turn on a regular basis, keeping track of what interests you and culling the vast quantity of data that doesn't interest you, RSS gives you the power to identify what really interests you and ensure that it is delivered to your desktop.
You subscribe to a feed by clicking an RSS icon in a browser to initiate the subscription process. The reader checks your subscribed feeds regularly for new content, and automatically downloads any updates that it finds.
A large number of web sites now provide RSS feeds, including the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, a plethora of web logs ("blogs"), and of course all those nerdy sites that specialise in mysterious IT topics! Feeds are now seen as an excellent way of gaining personalised access to news stories as soon as they are released.
How to tap into RSS resources
In order to read RSS "feeds" you need an RSS reader. There are many readers available to you, as a quick web search will indicate. Some cost a small amount of money, others are freeware. Some integrate with your internet browser software while others are standalone packages. Following the recent release in 2006 of Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 7, which has a built-in feed reader, feeds are becoming much more widely used and understood. Note also that Microsoft Outlook 2007 has a built-in capacity to receive feeds – this is not a commonly used version of Outlook yet but it is destined for gradual adoption.
How to subscribe a feed
Using the RSS feed on the Maxus web site as an example, the following screen shots show you how easy it is to use an RSS reader to subscribe to a feed. In creating the screen shots we used Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 as our browser software and feed reader. You can download any reader that suit your needs; you may find that your reader handles subscriptions slightly differently from Internet Explorer 7.
On the Maxus RSS page, you will find the universally recognised orange feed icon. 
Simply click on the icon to open the feed:
If you have not already subscribed to this particular feed, your Internet Explorer browser will give you the chance to subscribe:
When you click to subscribe, the subscription dialogue will open:
Click Subscribe again and the feed will be added to the list of feeds that you can see in your Internet Explorer Favorites Center pane:
Our news items provide you with a headline and a short abstract. If you want more information, you can either click to read more within your reader software or click to open the news item in your web browser software. And if you set your reader to check our feed on a regular basis for news items, each headline will be delivered to you as soon as it is released.
Why use RSS when you can use email?!
This paper by Robin Good on the LLRX web site is dated 2003 but still very relevant. It lists a number of compelling advantages of RSS over email. Read the paper in detail for the full list of advantages. Suffice to say that the list includes points such as:
- RSS is timely
- RSS is email independent
- The subscriber is in full control
- RSS is private
- RSS feeds are not blocked by spam and email filters
RSS and your library
RSS is user friendly, it's immediate, it's personalised, and it delivers relevant content without you or your users having to do anything. As mentioned above, most feeds are associated with online news sites or blogs. But feeds can serve an incredibly useful purpose in your library. For a start, you can give your end users access to external feeds that are of strong relevance to their fields of interest and expertise. But perhaps more importantly, you can also generate your own feeds from your own internal resources – for example, new items added to the catalogue on a specific topic, new journal issues received, or you can even "mash up" a variety of sources of information into one single mashup!
What is a mashup??
