Notes:

Moving along - what we're going to do today is we're going to start out by having Barret give you an understanding of what this magic thing called RSS really is. Barret will walk through an explanation of the technology, and some of the basic ways that it's being used most commonly. Once you have that foundation, I'm going to take over, and show you a few super simple ways that you can harness the power of RSS to repurpose information from our collections, as well as how you can push your own voice into new online spaces. We do want to make a lot of time for your questions, though, so - if we're lucky - we'll be done with our demos with about 15 or so minutes to spare. We have a few questions for you, and we're sure you'll have a few for us as well.

Before we get started, I want to ask you guys this question, posed originally by David Weinberger at last year's Computers In Libraries conference: Do libraries succeed by being where people go? Or do libraries succeed by going where people are? The underlying theme of this presentation can be captured by these words.

In the past when we talked about outreach, we often were referring to providing services beyond the libraries walls - taking our services to where people were, be it via the bookmobile, or setting up a branch or even a drop box in the local shopping mall or by putting a reference booth out on the lawn during a spring fair on campus. and when the web first sprang up, and we got our websites up and running, we thought that was great outreach work, because now people anywhere in the world could access our site, and students who never set foot in the library could access our content from their dorm rooms. However, now the web is starting to mirror the real world in that people often congregate in a few select places, and don't always come to our library websites, Now, we need to do virtual outreach. We need to reach beyond the boundaries of our own library's website and drop content into the virtual places that people are hanging out. We need to go where people are. And that is largely what RSS is about.

 

And that is also, where i'll turn things over to Barret.

Notes:

As Shelly mentioned, our users congregate in virtual places. For instance: Blackboard courses and social networking sites like Facebook. We would love for our library Web sites to become their "virtual hangouts," but let's face it: it's tough to compete with myspace.com. Furthermore, podcatchers, aggregators, and portal pages are revolutionizing the way that users get their information. These tools are turning information hunters into gatherers. Instead of visiting the NPR Web site, for instance, users are configuring iTunes to download podcasts from a variety of sources automatically. Likewise, users are getting news articles and blog posts piped directly into their portal pages rather than visiting the sites where the content is published.

For instance, iGoogle, Google's home page customization tool, allows users to import information from sites all over the Web. Features: "click and add" gadgets, feeds such scrolling list of latest blog posts or news headlines; recent NDBC buoy data.

So if users will be gathering information by using tools such as this, and hunting for information less and less, how will we make sure that our library resources reach them?

Notes:

Luckily, we can reach out to users by delivering information directly to them via the Web without even requiring that they visit our library Web sites. By using the same technology that makes customizable portal pages such as iGoogle possible we can make our resources and services virtually ubiquitous. This is not a dream of the future. This is the power of RSS! By harnessing the power of RSS, libraries can broadcast library news, blog posts, Wiki updates, database alerts, new title lists, and more to the same users who have discovered that aggregators and podcatchers will do their information-seeking for them.

Notes:

Really Simple Syndication:
Newspaper analogy: Associated Press is a syndicated news service. Articles published by AP appear in newspapers all over the country. RSS-delivered information is syndicated electronically in a similar manner: content posted to one website can be imported by RSS-enabled sites all over the Web, just the way that an AP story would appear in many newspapers.

Notes:

"Radio RSS": broadcasting and receiving
To use another analogy you can relate to, RSS is used to deliver information ( in the form of articles, podcasts, blog posts, or headlines/titles, etc.) over the web via a feed or "channel." The concept behind this is similar to radio broadcasting. This channel is a relationship between one website and an infinite number of others. We can think of the site originating the content as a "broadcaster," and the infinite number of other sites as "receivers."

An RSS feed will enable us to broadcast a chunk of information that is posted on a Web site -for instance an article or any news item- the way that a radio broadcasts a song from one location to many via radio waves. At the end of its journey, the song plays over the radio in a car, home, etc. After travelling via an RSS feed (a.k.a. channel), the news item, podcast, or other chunk of information will display or in the case of multimedia content, play, in an RSS receiver such as an aggregator. More on receivers coming up! But first...

Notes:

Let's bring all these analogies down to earth a little bit with some practical examples. One of the characteristics of the Web 2.0 movement is openness. Web 2.0 sites allow users to collaborate, contribute, and share content. RSS is one of the driving forces behind Web 2.0. It is the "wizard behind the curtain": the technology that allows the sharing to take place. You don't have to know a thing about RSS to take advantage of any of the types of sites listed here. But, via the magic of RSS, you can receive content from all of these sites without ever visiting them. You won't see RSS feeds available for a site that is static: in fact, you'll notice that sites in all of these categories have at least one thing in common: they are updated regularly. That's where RSS comes in handy. Whenever updated content such as new blog posts appear, they are broadcasted via an RSS feed. Some other examples of updates or changing content: photos added to a flickr account, edits to a wiki. Most of you are probably familiar with blogs and blogging. But just in case you aren't let's take a look at LibLine, the blog that Shelly and I co-authored while working at Houston Community College. Blog features: short articles called "posts" riddled with hypertext links; posts are reverse-chronologically ordered; ability to comment on posts.

Notes:

We noted that each of the examples of broadcasters on the previous slide offer regularly-updated content. Likewise, periodical databases, library catalogs, and eJournals are updated with new content constantly in the form of newly published articles or newly acquired books or eBooks. So it makes perfect sense that, increasingly, database vendors, integrated library systems, and periodical publishers are offering RSS feeds so that users can keep up with the latest additions to the collection. For instance, Ebsco databases enable users to create customized feeds that will broadcast new articles on specific research topics. (More on that later). Now let's take a look at how to subscribe to an RSS feed in order to receive content from RSS-enabled sites. Demo: "grabbing a feed URL." Highlights: look for the symbol that is becoming the standard link for subscribing to RSS feeds, or any of these symbols; subscribe by choosing your aggregator from a list, or look for a link to feed URL (" xml source" in this case); copy to clipboard. We'll use this link momentarily to subscribe to an RSS feed.

Notes:

So now you know about the wide variety of sites that can be used to broadcast information via an RSS feed. Portals, such as the highly customizable Google home page, and aggregators, such as Google Reader or Bloglines, can be thought of as receivers. Soon, Shelly will show you how to turn a Blackboard or WebCT classroom or any other Web page into a receiver of dynamic RSS-driven content that will refresh automatically whenever the site originating the content is updated! But for now, let's stick to the basics. Google Reader is similar to a portal page, but it's a much more sophisticated tool for capturing and organizing RSS-driven content. Let's have a look at Barret's Google Reader account. Highlighted features: latest photos from a flickr "pool," podcasts from NPR that play within the Google Reader, blog posts, etc. Now that we have the basics down, Shelly's going to show us some RSS magic that will enable you to broadcast your library resources and services to your users' "virtual hangouts."

Okay, so barret just made it pretty clear that RSS allows chunks of content that originate on one website, to automatically be displayed on another. The examples he showed us used products like google reader or iGoogle to re-display that information - which is absolutely great for individual use. Afterall, these things are locked behind personal accounts. But let's look at some examples at how we can take library content - both that we create and that we curate - and push it to sites beyond the library's website.

First - A local newspaper website. This story is about the current race to win the democratic nomination for president. by their very nature, news stories of this sort are not very in-depth. By using the RSS feeds coming out of a database such as Academic Search Premier, though, we can offer our local newspaper site the ability to pipe more in-depth articles to library users via the newspaper website. Think of it as a sort of pre-emptive reference. This could also be done on college and university campuses, too, by working in conjunction with student newspapers.

Second - in academic libraries, we can allow faculty to pull relevant information straight out of our databases or our ILSes and display it on their homepage. This could also be a great way to work with entire departments. Give them the opportunity to display a "new books" lsit or a "current research in the field" lists on their website as a service to both students and faculty.

Third - I know a lot of small town libraries often don't have a full-fledged webmaster in charge of their website. A lot of libraries that i've worked with often have just one page up on their city's municipal website - and often in those cases getting regular updates managed can be quite a chore that involves passing requests on to an IT department that may not hold the library as its first priority. Using the power of RSS we can take information from a site that is very easy to maintain - a basic weblog - and pass it directly to that municpal page.

Let's take a look at just how easy all of this is to accomplish.

So, i promised you all earlier that there was nothing more to this than pointing, clicking, copying, and pasting. If you can use a mouse and a keyboard, you can do this. And that's what I'm going to show you next.

And again, please remember that if we go through these demos a little quickly, do not worry. Just absorb what you can, because the demos will remain up and live at the address on your handout and you can walk through them when you get back to your library.

We'll look at how to take information out of a library database - in this case, ebsco - and pipe it into online classrooms.

Then we'll look at how you can take valuable audio content from NPR and send it to a classroom as well. Keep in mind that both of these work for ANY kind of destination webpage.

Next, we'll see an example of how to take content from a library blog and drop it into another website - which could be a newspaper website, a community events center website, or, really, any website at all.

Notes:

The point is really to make your content - both that you create and that you curate - as mashable as possible - to create content that can be repurposed by your patrons or other members of your community. How about you? Tell us how you're using RSS?

If you're not using it yet, what are some ways that you might? what sort of content do you have that might be RSS-ifiable?

Do any of the databases you have access to allow you to create customizable RSS feeds? Your ILS? Ask 'em about it.

Notes:

Discuss these ideas...

And why getting buy-in is important.

Talk about how this can be done?

After that we looked at ways you could repurpose RSSified information and bring it into the websites that your patrons are already using.