OCLC Western online training on RSS feeds

Last week I spent a couple hours taking OCLC Western's course on RSS feed. For those of you who do not know about RSS, it is a technology that delivers content on demand to information seekers. For example, I wanted to be notified automatically whenever Lorcan Dempsey (http://orweblog.oclc.org/) updates his blog on library technology. Lorcan has set up a command that I can go to that "feeds" me the information whenever he updates his page. It is then delived to wherever I want it (I use My Yahoo).

This OCLC Western online course took about 2 hours and although it was expensive ($75) it took me through the basics of RSS: definitions (with a nice thesaurus of terms), basic features, functions, and benefits. The next section gave me concrete ideas on how I could use RSS to merket services to the clibrary community. Finally the last section gave me informtion on how to implement it.

Some of the immediate implications I saw were:
Staff development (selected dissemination of timely information, based on an individuals specific area of specialization

PR for library news and activities, asking for feedback from users and notifying them of changes in hours and/or services

Most of all, the Hennepin County Librry gave the best example of how we can use RSS to publicize our resources by subject area and/or collections. Check it out at:
http://www.hclib.org/pub/search/RSS.cfm