It’s a day past Valentine’s Day, but I heart Talis!

Ground breaking Library Personalised RSS

“Talis, in partnership with Northumbria University Library, have launched a trial of personalised RSS (PRSS) feeds for Library users. This trial is part of the Talis Research Project Bluebird. Members of the trial and other interested parties, interact on the Talis Bluebird Forum.

Subscribers to their personal feed receive alerts from their Library account such as 'Item due for return in 3 days', or 'The item you reserved is now awaiting collection at the Library', or 'Your overdue item has already attracted in excess of £2.00 in charges'. The feed items provide a link to take the user, without an interviening login challenge, in to their Library interface at the apropriate page to take the required action such as renew the book on loan.

To illustrate the issues surrounding the requirement for alerting Library Users, to describe the technology used, and to give an overview of the trial I have published a white paper Personalised RSS for Library - User Interaction.

We have set-up a Demonstration PRSS Feed to show how the loaning activity of a fictitious user [Mr Draco Malfoy] would be represented in his Personalised RSS feed. Over the next couple of months Mr Malfoy will reserve, loan, and return (often late) items from the Demonstration Library to provide pseudo realistic RSS traffic.

So what is ground breaking then?

Firstly, Talis are the first LMS/ILS supplier to demonstrate live Library Borrower/Patron account data alerts using RSS.

Secondly, although there are many thousands of RSS feeds around there are very few that are personalised to a specific user on a specific system.…

PRSS opens up the third generation of RSS applications. (Podcasting ushered in the second generation. So many generations and not yet a teenager! )…

The image of Libraries just being places with lots of books where there is not much innovation is definitely old hat!” [panlibus]

Where to begin??

How about too… damn… cool!

How about a new term – PRSS? (I don’t think I’ve heard this anywhere else yet.) How about a vendor that didn’t stop to ask everybody why or take a poll? Instead, they looked around, recognized the value on their own, and just did it rather than talking about it (or worse yet, not talking about it).

How about the notice of fines? How about the fact that the library’s privacy policy is still applicable to the RSS feed? That’s a hee-uge point to note.

All wonderful and well, but the part that really has me drooling is the “feed items provide a link to take the user, without an interviening login challenge, in to their Library interface at the apropriate page to take the required action such as renew the book on loan” feature. How perfect and useful and efficient and progressive and innovative is that?!

More after I read the white paper (I’ve been able to subscribe to the demo feed successfully and I’m most curious to learn how they prevent you from subscribing to someone else’s feed), but major, major congratulations to Talis for picking up the ball, running with it, crossing the goal line, spiking it, and kicking the extra point! Well done!