Webloggers: Give to Tsunami Victims and I’ll Give Too

International aid organizations:
UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund)
United Nations' World Food Programme
Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors without Borders (donate!)
CARE International
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

UK/Europe:
Disasters Emergency Comittee (DEC) - comprises a raft of aid agencies, including the below and others
British Red Cross
Oxfam
Save the Children UK

North America:
American Red Cross
Canadian Red Cross
Save The Children
Oxfam America

Anders Jacobsen: Webloggers: Give to tsunami victims and I'll give too!

We had already made a donation as a family, but I’m definitely on board with helping Anders. You rock, dude.

Seattle Public Library? You Have Been RSSified!!

“Fiona from Blisspix sent over this great news from SPL:

‘The Seattle Public Library will replace its more than 20-year-old computer catalog with a new system called "Horizon" that will be implemented Wednesday, Feb. 23."

With the new Horizon system, patrons will notice a number of improvements, including...RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Just as Web sites now offer RSS as a means to provide updated information without having to ‘visit’ the site, the Horizon RSS feature allows search feeds (new titles from your favorite author) or a listing of ‘items out’ to be incorporated into new readers (My Yahoo! Or Bloglines).’ ” [Library Stuff]

w00t w00t! So congratulations to Dynix – it looks like they will be first out of the gate with native RSS feeds from the catalog (must update my presentations!)! Interestingly, they’re not even the ILS vendor that I had begun to think would make the big announcement first, which means we may see a second one very soon. I’m not surprised they are leading the way, though, because their rep was very responsive when I talked to him at last year’s Illinois Library Association conference. In fact, back in September, I predicted they might be first.

In Illinois, that means of the nine regional library systems, DuPage’s MAGIC catalog, Lincoln Trails’ LINC catalog, and Rolling Prairie’s HIP will be the first ones that could even possibly offer RSS feeds to their patrons. Unfortunately, there isn’t any version information available (nor a mention of RSS feeds) anywhere on the Dynix site, even in the press releases, so we don’t know if this is a fee-based add-on, if it requires an upgrade, etc. Hopefully they’ll flesh out the details soon.

I’m thrilled for Dynix users (hey, Peter – no more homegrown scraping!), but I’m sad for Innovative users like me. I really tried to push them to be first, only to find out that RSS wasn’t even on the agenda for 2005. Hopefully this will increase their awareness of the need, which they have failed to understand thus far.

Even if you don’t think a lot of users will benefit from this just yet, RSS feeds could save countless librarian-hours by automatically displaying new items on a library’s web site. How many librarians are doing this by hand for their sites? I’ll bet if we added them all up, we could literally save thousands of man hours a month if every vendor offered feeds from their catalogs. At my System alone, we have 77 libraries on one shared Innovative catalog. If each one spends just one hour per month posting new items on a web page or in an email newsletter, that’s 77 hours right there. Multiply that by 12 months and we’re at 924 hours of saved time for just one year for a mere fraction of Illinois libraries, let alone nationwide or even globally. Plus, libraries that didn’t have the resources to devote to keeping this information current on their web site could now do so simply by adding a few lines of code to a web page.

So come on, Innovative. I’ve been begging, and I’ll do it again now. Please, please, please give us RSS feeds out of the catalog sooner rather than later! Help us and our patrons, Obi-Wan. You’re our only hope!

And congrats again to Dynix!

Update: Luke the Librarian followed up on this news and clarifies the press release:

“I did some further checking on this, so credit can be given where it is due. Credit for this should not go to Dynix -- although the next version of their Horizon Information Portal will allow patrons to add external RSS feeds to their personal portals, it does *not* enable libraries to create RSS feeds for their patrons as described in the SPL press release. Credit should instead go to the systems librarians at SPL, who have created this solution on their own -- and have been very good about offering it to other Horizon libraries who are interested.”

Nice catch, Luke! So I rescind my credit for Dynix, and they’re NOT first out of the gate. Instead, staff at SPL have been forced to add this themselves, but kudos to them for having and spending the resources to do it and then sharing the work with other Horizon libraries.

All of which takes us back to square one, asking which ILS vendor will offer RSS natively from the catalog. Will we see an announcement next week? Which one will be first to save its customers thousands and thousands of hours of work? Hey, Innovative - if you hurry, you could still be first!