Action for Libraries
The Internet Connection
By Michael Sauers
LibraryThing and Your Library
Back in July I found myself in Iowa as a presenter at the state library's Rural Sustainability workshops being held throughout the state. I was there to provide a presentation about USB technology, but many other topics were also discussed. In talking with Karen Burns, administrator of the Southwest Library Service Area, she mentioned that she wished there was a way to take the content of an RSS feed and republish it as part of a Web page. (As a result, the content of the Web page would be automatically updated.) I informed her that with tools like Feed2JS and FeedDigest, she could do exactly what she wanted. She promised to try it out as soon as she had the time.
Fast forward to the end of August. Obviously Karen found time and now is totally hooked on the concept. She sent me an e-mail link to some test pages, adding that she'd have the Shenadoah Public Library using her idea shortly. What she did was set up SPL with a LibraryThing account and Carrie Falk, the library's Teen and Tech Librarian entered a few of their recent acquisitions. (Doing this involves just entering or importing ISBNs and adding descriptive tags to each item.)
Karen then took the RSS feed for SPL's recently added books and fed it into FeedRoll. FeedRoll provided her with a snippet of JavaScript which she then placed in the HTML code of SPL's homepage. As a result, a list of the 10 most recent items added to the library were automatically displayed on the library's home page.
I blogged about this, and the folks at LibraryThing picked up on it and blogged about it on the LibraryThing blog. As an aside, they wondered why the library wasn't using the LibraryThing "blog widget." Intrigued, I went hunting.
It turns out that although my suggestion of using a third-party service such as FeedRoll worked, there is a much simpler way to accomplish the same thing - the aforementioned LibraryThing blog widget. The blog widget allows you to bypass the need for a third-party RSS processor and get the data directly out of LibraryThing and onto your Web page by choosing some options from a form and using the JavaScript that LibraryThing generates.
Besides being a more direct route to the desired result, the LibraryThing blog widget allowed for additional customizations a third-party service did not. The most notable examples: the inclusion of cover images, showing a random list of books in your LibraryThing account (so patrons see a different list each time they visit the library's site) and the ability to limit which books are displayed based on their associated tags.
(For example, if you wanted to display just a list of your new history books, you could instruct the blog widget to output only those books that were tagged as "history.")
According to SLP's Karen Burns, by the time you read this column, several other libraries in Southwest Iowa will also be taking advantage of LibraryThing to automatically feature their new titles on their home pages. These libraries include Gibson Memorial Library (Creston, IA), Southwestern Community College LRC, Atlantic Public Library and the Southwest Iowa Library Service Area .
The use of this tool will continue to be tweaked as new situations arise, but with just a minimal amount of Web page editing knowledge, you can implement the same feature on your library's Web site in just a matter of minutes.