What Is RSS?

“The Seattle Public Library provides three types of RSS feeds. The first type is a feed of items checked out from the library. This allows you to keep track of your library books through your RSS reader. Several days before an item is overdue, you will get a new story alerting you that the book will soon be due with a link to the catalog so you can log in and renew the item if you want to hang on to it. This feature is especially useful if you want to keep track of several peoples’ items out at the same time, for instance for your children or other family members.

A feed of your items out is available at a URL of the following form:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss/itemsout.jsp?barcode=<your barcode>&pin=<your PIN>

You should replace with the barcode number that you type in to log in to your account in the library’s online catalog and with the PIN you use.

For instance, if your barcode was 1000123456789 and your PIN was 1234, the URL that you would use to get the RSS feed of your items out would be:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss/itemsout.jsp?barcode=1000123456789&pin=1234

The second type of feed is one of the items you have on hold from the library. This helps you keep track of when your holds are ready for pickup. Please keep in mind that you may get a notification that a hold is ready for pickup before the hold is actually waiting for you. This is because the new story is generated when the hold makes it to your library branch, not when it actually gets put on the holds shelf.

A feed of your holds is available at a URL of the following form:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss/holds.jsp?barcode=<your barcode>&pin=<your PIN>

As with the items out feed, you want to substitute <your barcode> and <your PIN> with your actual barcode number and PIN. For instance, if your barcode was 1000123456789 and your PIN was 1234, the URL that you would use to get the RSS feed of your holds would be:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss/holds.jsp?barcode=1000123456789&pin=1234

SPL also offers feeds based upon nearly any search you can do from within our catalog. This allows you to be notified when a new item on a topic you are interested in or by your favorite author becomes available.

At the bottom of every brief summary screen of search results in the catalog you will see an orange XML button which will give you a feed of the search that you just performed.

You can also construct your own feed. For instance, the following URL will give you a feed of the last 10 items containing the term "film noir" added to the catalog:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss?term=film+noir

Every time a new item containing the term "film noir" is added to the catalog, you will get a new story in your RSS reader.

And the following will give you a feed of the most recently published 100 items in our catalog containing the name Stephen King:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss?term="Stephen King"&index=name&npp=100

More complex feeds are best constructed by doing the appropriate search through the catalog and then taking the RSS feed provided as a link at the bottom of the screen.” [Seattle Public Library, via a crank’s progress]

Pretty damn cool, although completely buried. I couldn’t find this page, so I don’t know how Paul Beard did. No press releases, no announcements on the front pages, nothing. Come on, SPL, show us what you’ve got! Then let us know if this is your homegrown solution or if you’re using Sirsi’s Dynix’s code.  :-)