RSS and Librarians

One of the most important attributes of a librarian is his or her ability to stay aware of the latest issues, discussions, and innovations in the profession, since information in the field changes so quickly. This can be a daunting task, and RSS has an important role to play as a current awareness service, by helping librarians keep up-to-date without having to spend enormous amounts of time every day doing so. 1
Some time-saving uses of RSS for librarians:
  • Eliminates the need to navigate to various sites a few times a day to check for updates -- with RSS, new content is delivered to you, and you can read it whenever it's convenient.
  • Cuts down on the amount of email in your inbox - discussions that formerly took place on listservs can now happen on blogs, where the latest postings are broadcast via RSS.
 An unfortunate librarian

This poor librarian has just logged into his email account, only to discover there are 103 emails for him to sort through.
As Ben Hammersley wrote in his column for the Guardian: "You don't get the pictures, the layout or the advertising of the real version, but the meaty bits are there for the chewing. And this means you can grab the contents of 100 sites in one bite, and taste exactly what's new." 2

A few good library blogs to subscribe to are those listed below, which provide information to help professionals keep up-to-date in the LIS (Library and Information Science) field.


Generate webpage content automatically
  • RSS also has the power to generate webpages automatically, saving a lot of time and money for librarians.  Using RSS, librarians can create "low-overhead" (i.e. cheap to produce, and essentially no-maintenance) webpages simply by writing some simple code, or copying and pasting code made freely available on the web (an example can be found here). 3  This code allows you to have RSS content aggregated, displayed and updated on a website, creating self-updating content, with minimal maintenance work required. 
  • A good example of this concept is the website LISFeeds.com, where RSS feeds from different library-related websites and blogs are "scraped" for their content, and aggregated on one website. 
  • This means that people who visit websites that include RSS content are presented with new information every time they return to the site, making a site with good RSS feeds potentially very relevant for its viewers.  (This of course depends on how often the source material is updated.  If someone updates their website only once per month, your RSS-aggregating website will naturally only update that often as well.)
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