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By Brian Westra
 While many of us have enjoyed the
prospects that RSS promised, it generally remains an unused tool among those we
support in our organisations. Perhaps it's due to lack of experience with the
software or services, resistance to changes in information workflow, confusion
or poor understanding of the benefits, or simply that users feel they already
have too much information to manage. My own experience and conversations with
staff indicated that a lack of familiarity with RSS, coupled with a point of need justification for delving into RSS, were
significant factors in the low level of adoption.
Worth the effort
Of course if you are looking at using RSS for yourself or your organisation,
the first step is to determine if it provides the kinds of benefits that can
justify the effort. In my case, employing RSS arose out of the need to more
efficiently monitor a diverse set of information resources for myself, while
providing value-added benefits to staff and the public by pre-screening a
number of feeds and selecting items targeted to our specific services and
projects.
My employer at the time had approximately 65 staff employed by several city and
county government divisions and departments. Project and service level teams
were sometimes composed of staff from more than one of these offices, and the
makeup of those teams often changed over time.
To facilitate communication with these individuals and teams, I created a web
application through which staff could post and receive information via subscription
to self-selected topic areas. While the design was modeled on Resource Shelf (http://www.resourceshelf.com/)
and other blogs, I developed a set of authentication, subscription, and
authoring tools that were intended to integrate personalisation and internal
information sharing. Staff expressed interest in using the system to keep
themselves up to date, but they rarely posted items themselves. On the other
hand, I was monitoring between 30 and 40 RSS feeds on a regular basis as the
source for my frequent posts to the system.
In further conversations with staff, they commented that they liked to receive
content focused on their project and team needs through the items I was passing
along, though it was clear they weren't interested in doing much posting
themselves. For this reason, I set aside this home-grown web application to
explore RSS-based tools for selecting and aggregating RSS feed items.
Facilitating RSS access
If there is relevant RSS content for your organisation, there are at least two
ways in which you as a librarian or other information professional can
facilitate its use to update and inform your organisation. One option is to
promote and enable widespread use of RSS by staff, through outreach and
training. Highlighting easy-to-use tools and training staff in the basic
concepts of RSS can increase adoption.
A complementary approach is to increase the value of RSS to the organisation by
repurposing specific, targeted posts into feeds that meet individual and team
needs. The large number of feeds one can find and search is likely to provide
some useful content, but sifting through a high volume of content for useful
information can be a disincentive to maintaining multiple subscriptions. If you
or someone in your organisation is willing to filter and select the relevant
content, similar to the news clipping services of times past, such a service
will help reduce the chaff and enable staff to more easily locate and track
the information they need. Anything that can help people manage their
information overload is sure to be welcome. Providing this kind of service and
making it part of the value proposition for staff involved is likely to be the
greater challenge.
Like a normal RSS feed, filtered or selected feeds can be output as
subscription services, channeled through RSS management tools, and displayed
via widgets in web pages, accommodating those that don't use RSS readers.
Another component to RSS is to use tools for filtering on the front end, that
is, for you as the information services person, so you have less to review
before passing them along to your staff.
In keeping with the theme of ease of use, and to minimise implementation costs
and effort, I chose Google Reader for the workshops I held with staff at my
organisation. I find Reader easy to set up and use for my own needs, and using
a web application meant that IT staff were not required to install software on
user desktops nor in the classroom. An introduction to Reader also dovetailed
with exploring other Google applications that might interest staff, such as the
iGoogle homepage and Google Docs.
Teaching about a web application while everyone was logged into their own
account made it easy to do hands-on training in configuration and feed
subscription that would then be accessible for the participants from their own
desktops. It is critical to actively engage attendees with the tools or
resources in a workshop, since this allows them to apply their training in the
moment, gaining immediate feedback and concrete outcomes. Creating a workshop
that incorporates experiential learning can mean more work for the instructor,
but it improves retention and seems to be a better model for adult learners. An
additional benefit of a successful hands-on class is that the participants come
away with learning and resources that have a tangible impact, which can be an
incentive for participation in future workshop opportunities.
Filtering the feeds
Training staff in how to use an RSS reader is one part of the picture. It may
be another challenge for you to devote the time necessary to monitor feeds and
select relevant content for your subscribers. My approach to this second issue
was to build on the concept of the original home-grown system and use Google
Reader for selecting and posting items for specific target audiences in the
organisation. With 65 staff there was a comparatively large number of project
teams and services to support. These ranged from industries (e.g. auto, dry
cleaning, dental) to products (e.g. fire retardants, pharmaceuticals), as well
as possible impacted populations, and other subjects.
There are several options for filtering and mashing RSS feeds based on keyword
matching and other automated processes. Past articles on Yahoo! Pipes in
November 2009
(http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/find/4342) and Google Reader in
December 2009 (http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/manage/4394) have reviewed
these. In addition, Reader supports a more granular, manual selection approach,
via tagging items for display through clips,
which I find to better meet my organisation's needs.
The clips option, once set up, is a fairly seamless method through which you
can select and syndicate items from the feeds you monitor. Essentially, items
that you tag in Reader can then be displayed via embeddable JavaScript widgets,
called clips, in your web pages. Tagged items are visible on the web page
almost immediately (once the page is refreshed). The clips method also provides
a view all link at the bottom of the window to a Google
page that has a subscription link, and lets you page back through past items.
The view all pages don't offer many configuration options
for branding or layout, but they do provide access to all past items. Reader
also enables you to create an embeddable widget to display a blogroll of the
feeds you are monitoring.
Here's a screen shot of one of the pages I use for displaying items:
The clips can be fed through the Google AJAX Feed API if you'd like greater
control and more options for configuring the display through CSS customisation
and API methods. However, unlike the instantaneous update of Google clips, the
Feed API relies on an hourly feedcrawl to update the displayed items. Another
limitation is that it restricts the display to only the current items on the
page (i.e. no view more option to scroll back), although this list
could be set to display up to 250 items.
Email applications
Email is another option for distributing
your selected feed items, particularly for those who are reluctant to subscribe
with an RSS reader. By running the clips feed through Feedburner, you can
create an email subscription option to display on the web page for your feeds.
The flexibility to select and
display individual feed items from across a range of sources may open up new
opportunities for you to distribute truly targeted information. For instance,
you can use TicTOCs (http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/) or other journal table of
contents feeds to select articles to include in a research guide or research
project page. Some other options include:
- new books lists
- conference announcements and reviews
- research highlights
- development and donor news from local, regional, and
national news sources.
By training staff, integrating useful feeds and flexible delivery channels,
you can leverage some of those promised RSS benefits to improve not only your
information harvesting and distribution services on behalf of staff, but also the
management of your organisation's diverse information resources.
By Brian Westra
Brian Westra is the Lorry I. Lokey Science Data Services Librarian at
the University of Oregon, where he enjoys developing services to meet
the challenges of curating scientific research data. His experience
includes work in both academic and government libraries, including web
application development, information architecture, and science
reference and instruction. He has an MS in Environmental Science from
Western Washington University, and an MSI in Library and Information
Services from the University of Michigan.
FUMSI articles by Brian Westra »
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