RSS Feeds:
Promoting New Materials
Bobby Goff & Ginger Williams
Mississippi State University Libraries
Ginger said...
We need a webpage
To promote books and media
Added to the collection this
month
From purchases and gifts
Sorted by subject
With option to see titles added
in previous months
The Systems Staff replied
“Sure! What about RSS feeds,
too?”
Ginger: “What’s an
RSS feed?”
Systems: “People subscribe to RSS
feeds on websites and updates are
delivered to them automatically.”
Anita Winger …
Developed a script to pull
recently added titles from
SIRSI
Tweaked the script to
eliminate added volumes
of the US Code and
similar unwanted items
Tweaked it again to clean
up results and dump
them into a database
Ginger created subject list with
LC Classifications
Q - QA
General Science, Mathematics, Computer Science
QB - QE
Physical Sciences -- Astronomy, Physics,
Chemistry, Geology
QH - QZ Life Sciences - Biology, Botany, Ecology, Zoology
R - RZ
Medicine
S - SZ
Agriculture, Forestry, Veterinary Medicine, and
Wildlife
Bobby …
Developed web
application that pulls
titles from Anita’s
database by LC Class
To create title lists for
new materials
And to create RSS feeds
Options offered
RSS feeds to deliver new titles to
subscribers
Web page of new titles for the month, by
subject, collection, or library
Web pages of titles for past 60, 90, 180, or
365 days
Update Requirements
Script to pull titles from SIRSI is run
weekly. Script creates an excel file.
The excel file is then used to update the
database.
Total time per week 30 minutes.
What’s next?
Expand – Include government documents
with SuDoc class numbers
Advertise – Use Podcasts to increase
awareness of RSS feeds for new materials
Create automated script
Technical Specifications
Perl Script is run against Sirsi, exporting
desired results to an Excel File
Excel File is then imported into SQL 2000
database
ASP pages then query the database and
displays New materials data in either RSS
or HTML
Link to Opac is formed