A lot of people in the library blogosphere get excited when an ILS vendor announces some kind of RSS capability for their online catalogs. I wanted to mention here some excitement of my own when I recently discovered some interesting RSS functionality for the ILS I maintain (Ex Libris Aleph 500), developed by Peter Corrigan of the National University of Ireland, Galway, James Hardiman Library. Peter has implemented this in relation to A9.com’s OpenSearch technology.

See his entry at A9.com and also click here to see a sample search. (Note the orange icons for RSS and Permalink in the upper lefthand side.) Yes, this is cool!

I also read on the North American Aleph Users Group discussion list that the new product manager for Aleph, Katriel Reichman, is actively tracking and investigating the use of RSS in Ex Libris products, including SFX and MetaLib.