This is the second post in a series produced for studying purposes. Not quite what I post normally, but I imagine it will let you see a different side of me.

I’ve been a fan of RSS for quite some time. I’ve loaded up all of my news feeds into Google Reader and it’s the primary way that information is fed to me on the Internet. Although reports of the death of RSS at the hands of Twitter and Facebook are somewhat exaggerated, I’d like to think that I’m going to keep using Google Reader because I like to curate my own content. I do read links posted on Facebook and Twitter, but the vast majority of what I consume comes through Reader.

I have to admit, my use of RSS is quite vanilla. I load up a feed from a web site and leave it at that. So, for this post, I explored a couple of examples where the use of RSS is a little more dynamic.

The organisations formerly known as TAFE in Western Australia use a joint catalogue. That catalogue has a simple “New Books” function that lets you browse, well, new books (and, of course, new non-book resources). Once you’re looking at a particular list of new books, you can access an RSS feed that will deliver these books right to your browser.

How can this be handy to libraries to improve their services? Well, a “New books” feed would be great in letting people keep track of what their library has for them, without having to go into the library to visit the new books display. The RSS is also entirely automated, so Librarians won’t have to manually email out their new acquisitions.

Another nice use of RSS is a vanity feed. By using a service like Yahoo Pipes, you can grab a LOT of feeds and filter posts by keyword. This is particularly useful if you just want to find out what other people are saying about you or your organisation. Of course, you need a somewhat unique name to be able to pull this off – mine is an excellent example

Vanity feeds can also be useful for libraries. Admittedly, this would mostly benefit larger libraries that actually do generate buzz on social media and/or websites. However, it could prove to be an invaluable source of feedback beyond the paper feedback form.