Librarians should be aggRSSive
On Thursday, June 22, I attended the UBC e-Strategy Town Hall "20/20 Visions of 2010." When I was not busy presenting a poster on podcasting and health libraries, I attended two sessions that should interest any librarian who likes RSS and WordPress. Let's start with RSS (or Atom).
One session was on "Remixing and Republishing Dynamic Content Made Easy" by the UBC Office of Learning Technology. The "star" of the presentation was aggRSSive, an open source application developed at UBC, which allows a person to manage feeds, and republish the content of feeds on another web page. What makes aggRSSive neat is that you can combine multiple feeds into one feed! You can even tag your feeds (i.e. assign a "subject heading" to a feed). Yes, you can combine feeds with a few clicks!
Why would I want to combine feeds? Perhaps you have feeds on a similar topic, and you only want to handle one incoming feed on your web site, blog, etc. For example, I have a Political Science Major, so I decided that I want to know about new books on political science acquired by UBC Library and the University of Alberta Library. Both of these libraries offer RSS feeds, so I subscribe to them:
1. UBC Library RSS feeds for new materials and
2. University of Alberta RSS feeds for new books
With aggRSSive, I can combine them into one feed, and display the results anywhere.
Here is what makes aggRSSive irresistible for librarians: you will be able to filter the content of feeds! And I mean "filter" in the good sense of the word from a librarian's point of view. According to the developers, an update to aggRSSive, which is planned for release in late summer 2006, will allow you to filter the content of a feed with keywords.
Why would I want to filter a feed?
Because there is too much information. I subscribe to BBC News feeds, but I do not always want to see all the stories of the day. Imagine I wanted to only view BBC News content that had the term "open access" in the article. aggRSSive would let me filter out the other articles, while continuing to feed my web page, blog, or news aggregator (i.e. I use Bloglines).
One session was on "Remixing and Republishing Dynamic Content Made Easy" by the UBC Office of Learning Technology. The "star" of the presentation was aggRSSive, an open source application developed at UBC, which allows a person to manage feeds, and republish the content of feeds on another web page. What makes aggRSSive neat is that you can combine multiple feeds into one feed! You can even tag your feeds (i.e. assign a "subject heading" to a feed). Yes, you can combine feeds with a few clicks!
Why would I want to combine feeds? Perhaps you have feeds on a similar topic, and you only want to handle one incoming feed on your web site, blog, etc. For example, I have a Political Science Major, so I decided that I want to know about new books on political science acquired by UBC Library and the University of Alberta Library. Both of these libraries offer RSS feeds, so I subscribe to them:
1. UBC Library RSS feeds for new materials and
2. University of Alberta RSS feeds for new books
With aggRSSive, I can combine them into one feed, and display the results anywhere.
Here is what makes aggRSSive irresistible for librarians: you will be able to filter the content of feeds! And I mean "filter" in the good sense of the word from a librarian's point of view. According to the developers, an update to aggRSSive, which is planned for release in late summer 2006, will allow you to filter the content of a feed with keywords.
Why would I want to filter a feed?
Because there is too much information. I subscribe to BBC News feeds, but I do not always want to see all the stories of the day. Imagine I wanted to only view BBC News content that had the term "open access" in the article. aggRSSive would let me filter out the other articles, while continuing to feed my web page, blog, or news aggregator (i.e. I use Bloglines).
posted by Jeremiah at 8:25 p.m.
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