"Integrating RSS Feeds of New Books into the Campus Course Management System"

A good Article by Edward M. Corrado and Heather L. Moulaison "Integrating RSS Feeds of New Books into the Campus Course Management System"

The Idea to Integrate

My idea was to find a way to integrate RSS feeds of new subject-specific books into the course management system (CMS) on campus. We all know that RSS is a great way to manage constant­ly updating information. There are two typical ways to view RSS: 1) Use an RSS aggregator (see sidebar on page 64), and 2) Have the feeds show up automatically on a Web page. The latter is the basis for my idea. The course instructor can set up an automatic RSS feed that appears when a student opens the course page in the CMS. Feeds can still be down­­loaded to an aggregator (at right), but this requires a user to open the aggregator, and our students already have too much to do (Byrne 2005). Embedding the information in the user’s work­ flow has been the fo­cus of some previous articles, and this seemed like a good way to have a captive audience of sorts (Dempsey 2005).

The goal of this particular idea was to get relevant lists of recent and available monographic acquisitions to display prominently within the CMS page for any given class on any given subject. The headlines would be tailored to that course, and would anticipate user need. TCNJ has its own homegrown course management system called the Simple Online Courseware System (SOCS). Other CMSs such as Blackboard already allow professors to display RSS feeds inside the CMS page. The IT folks working on SOCS were receptive to the idea of improving our system by adding a similar RSS feature. It was up to the library to create the RSS feed...........

Our Methodology for Feeding the Data

I create the RSS feeds of new library acquisitions in a three-stage process:

1. ‑Get the appropriate data out of the library catalog.

2. ‑Convert the data into an RSS feed.

3. ‑Display the RSS feed in the CMS. Since Voyager is built on a relational database (Oracle) and I am familiar with SQL*Plus, I was confident that getting the required data out of Voyager would be a minor detail. What was not a minor detail, however, was determining what data should be used. First, I had to decide what should be advertised in the feeds as a “new” acquisition. After consulting with technical services, I found that it can take as long as 3 days after being cataloged for an item to get processed and be shelved. I only want books to appear in the RSS feed if they are recently acquired and fully processed. Based on our library’s work flows, I decided that a book with an item record created between 3 and 60 days prior should be considered new for this project." for full article ....here