Problems

RSS is, however, by no means perfect. There are some issues to keep in mind when talking about the merits of RSS...

There are five different versions of RSS, one (RSS 1.0) of which is W3C compliant (an international consortium working to develop web standards) 1
RSS 0.91, an older version of RSS, is still widely-used, because of its simplicity 2
RSS 2.0 is owned by a non-profit group at the Harvard Law School 3
Atom is a "rival format" to RSS, and is "on its way" to becoming a standard of the Internet Engineering Task Force (another group working to create web standards) 4
All of these versions are based on XML (Atom included) - the difference is that only RSS 1.0 is designed to work with RDF (also developed by W3C). 5 ("RDF provides a common framework for expressing ... information so it can be exchanged between applications without loss of meaning." 6)
There's a debate in the "techie" community about whether Atom should base itself on RDF, or if Atom and RSS 2.0 should be amalgamated 7

What does all this mean? Until the debate around these different versions of RSS and Atom resolves itself, it's a good idea, as an RSS content provider, to provide both Atom and RSS feeds. 8 Also, not all aggregators may necessarily be able to read the different feed formats, and this could result in complications in the future, until some standards are hopefully agreed upon. 9

RSS has no history: If no data is requested from an RSS feed for awhile, and later on if data is requested, only the most recent updates will be received, meaning that all of the other material must be manually searched for and retrieved via the content provider's website - it's impossible to retrieve this information via RSS. 10

Some believe that RSS feeds will become vehicles for advertising. Producing many feeds daily is quite expensive, since it uses up bandwidth, so some predict that to offset this cost, ads will be broadcast as RSS feeds, along with the content the user subscribed to. 11

Most importantly - RSS is quite trendy right now amount the tech-elites, and content providers must guard against the common tendency to provide RSS feeds just for the sake of it. Libraries (or anyone else, for that matter) should not rely on the novelty of the technology alone to attract users - quality, relevant content is what's needed to draw readers and keep them coming back.