RSS feed exercise

The RSS feeds that I found on libraries and e-books covered a number of areas such as the services of interest to young adults, state or national libraries as well as releases of new books and old ones through project Gutenberg.

I noticed that the Feedly interface is not as intuitive as the one used by Google reader. Also it does not show you the RSS feeds you have when you sign in just the new posts which was a feature of Google reader that I liked. Feedly is not difficult to use as some exploration will allow users to find and add feeds. A nice feature that I noticed in Feedly which I did not see in Google reader is the indexing of feeds. This makes it easier to find the feeds that you are interested in if you have subscribed to a large number of feeds.

What do you like about RSS & newsreaders?
When someone finds a blog or news website, RSS feeds and newsreaders assist in collecting together the information that the author puts in the feed with that being provided by other feeds so the reader saves time looking for the various blogs and newsfeeds they are interested in and seeing if there is anything new.
By subscribing to an academically minded blog it may be possible to greatly decrease the time required to locate journals / articles that are relevant to the area that is being researched or obtain information on new technology and techniques for conducting research.

How do you think you might be able to use this technology in your personal life?
Last year when we looked at RSS feeds and blogs I found several feeds from sites that looked at various aspects of the medieval world and which could be used to assist in finding information. The podcast from medieval archive features several stories on famous individuals and events which are quite interesting. There was also a blog containing reviews of scholarly books looking at the middle ages which could be of use to re-enactors.

How can libraries use RSS or take advantage of this technology
Libraries can use RSS feeds to advice subscribers of any new services and products that are being brought in or those which are being phased out. For example when new books arrive, a list and brief description of each could be posted to the library's feed to stimulate interest. Alternately the RSS feed might be used for disseminating flyers / advertisements for upcoming events such as a visit from a respected author or to distribute the library's newsletter by attaching a file to a blog entry.
There are already many blogs out there which are being used by libraries and librarians to communicate with each other and share ideas to improve the services that they provide.
RSS feeds operated by other organisations and businesses which libraries can take advantage of include those feeds from publishers and distributors advertising the release of new products to assist in determining what products the library should acquire. They can also use third party feeds to get well written reviews for inclusion in the catalogue.