A couple of weeks ago, I pointed out problems with RSS feeds associated with restricted journals because of the authentication issue for off-campus users. I was looking over my bookmarks today, and rediscovered the RSS Creator, a piece of software created to address this issue.

RSS Creator was written by David Walker, Web Development Librarian at California State University, San Marcos. Using data in SFX, the software establishes RSS feeds that create an OpenURL for each article title available to the campus. All the links point to the library's SFX menu. Off-campus users are presented with proxied links to any article they want to read; this is the part that solves the authentication issue.

RSS Creator is an in-house solution. The software is in Beta 2 and (as far as I can tell) not available for distribution. The feed creation methodology is based on the systems in use at the San Marcos Library. This institution is an Ex Libris shop that has implemented both SFX and MetaLib. The MetaLib part is important, since the newspaper or journal must be searchable via MetaLib in order for its data to make its way into the RSS Creator system.

Essentially, RSS Creator bypasses the RSS feeds created by vendors and generates its own. This reinforces my point that RSS feeds, as currently maintained by vendors, are inadequate to meet the needs of researchers. David also makes the useful point that simply locating all the RSS feeds available to a library is tedious.

On a related note, I experimented with setting up an RSS-only alert on EBSCO's database Academic Search Premier. It wasn't too difficult, but it did take some patience. The important part was setting up the feed while I was off campus (or on campus using a modem and an ISP) so that the feed link would be rewritten to point to EZproxy for off-campus authentication. And of course, I had already created a record in the EZproxy configuration file to cover the address of the RSS feed.

On campus, my alert URL looks like this: http://rss.epnet.com/AlertSyndicationService/Syndication.asmx/GetFeed?guid=[alert #]

Off campus, it looks like this: http://rss.epnet.com.libproxy.albany.edu/AlertSyndicationService/Syndication.asmx/GetFeed?guid=[alert #]

Notice that the second URL has been rewritten to include my library's proxy string. This happened automatically while I was setting up the alert because my EBSCO session was an authenticated one from off campus.

I subscribed to the feed in my RSS reader using the second URL. All I have to do now is wait for the data to come in.

Everything works, but it sure isn't the easiest process from start to finish, especially if you include the creation of the extra record in EZproxy.cfg. RSS alerts won't be useful to researchers until they're much easier to deal with.