My Thoughts on the Case Studies

Categories & Guides - Kansas City Public Library

I wasn’t too impressed with the Kansas City Public Library’s use of RSS. I think that patrons who are unfamiliar with the concept of RSS would be a little confused. They do explain the concept of RSS, but they don’t seem to make the actual subscribing part that easy. When you click on a subject under “most popular guides” the XML link is all the way at the bottom of the page. It is not very prominent and I’m sure that many people don’t even pay attention to it. I think that the Kansas City Public Library should try to highlight the fact that they use RSS and move the link higher up on the page.

Hennepin County Library - Subscribe to our RSS Feeds

In addition to regular library news and announcements, the Hennepin County Library offers feeds on various subject guides. Many of these guides contain information that would be of great help to all sorts of library patrons. I was especially pleased to find subject guides on learning English, immigration and citizenship, jobs and careers and parenting and childcare. What a great way for the library to reach out to their patrons! I am very glad to see a library using RSS technology to offer such valuable assistance.

NHMCCD

NHMCCD’s use of RSS is neat because it allows users to view a sample of the current content of each feed before subscribing. I think that this is a very helpful feature because sometimes a title is not always enough information when deciding if a feed is something in which you are interested.

Tacoma Public Library - RSS/XML Feeds

I like that the Tacoma Public Library includes cover art in their feeds. It is nice to have a visual of all of the new books. Also, I think that knowing what the cover looks like would be helpful for patrons who have read the feed and wish to find the book at the library.

University of Oklahoma Libraries RSS feeds

I was quite impressed with the New Book feeds at the University of Oklahoma Libraries. You can subscribe to any general discipline feed, or if you are interested in something more specific, you can click on the discipline, such as Language and Literature, to find a vast array of options, ranging from Artificial languages to Modern Icelandic literature.

Western Kentucky University Libraries

I don’t like how Western Kentucky University Libraries have set up their RSS. Only some links have RSS feeds and I can’t seem to figure out the reasoning behind why some do and some do not. Also, many of the feeds are confusing. Patrons can subscribe to three different event feeds: coming events, current events, and past events. Wouldn’t it make more sense to put all of these “events” in one communal feed? One of the libraries subheadings is entitled “stuff”. Could this be any less helpful? What the heck is “stuff”? And to make matters worse there are two feeds to which users can subscribe: new and old. Is anyone really going to be interested in subscribing to “old stuff’? Oh dear……