OK, I agree, it's enough already with the various names for RSS! Is it Really Simple Syndication? Rich Site Summary? RDF Site Summary? or something else?

When it comes right down to it, few of us really care. The important thing is that we understand RSS: what it is, how to use it, and how to make it available to our users.

RSS has enormous potential for academics, but there are barriers to its use that have prevented it from achieving a major breakthrough.

It's easy enough to understand that RSS is an XML-based feed that can be pushed to users. Feeds can be read with a variety of client newsreaders, of which the RSS Compendium site lists a bunch. You can also subscribe to feeds on Web-based subscription services so that you can access your feeds anywhere; Bloglines is a good example of this.

Thankfully, the era of needing a separate piece of software or a destination Web site may come to an end. The Firefox browser has long offered an integrated reader, but the real advance will take place when Internet Explorer (with its much higher user base) does the same when its version 7 is released.

Many of us probably know RSS junkies who need their daily dose of feed reading to keep up with the latest. There are some good RSS search sites out there, for example Syndic8.com and the always fun SurfWax LookAhead that uses Ajax to fill in results as you type your search. RSS is a fantastic technology - or could be.

When RSS feeds are derived from free services such as online newspapers, Web sites and blogs, access is not a problem. Students and faculty who are either on campus or at a remote location have equal access. However, the barriers go sky high when an off-campus user subscribes to a feed offered by a vendor of licensed materials, for example Project Muse or Ingenta. RSS feeds from these sites are usually in the form of Table of Contents and new issue alerts, a useful thing for researchers.

What's the problem? These RSS feeds are linked from restricted sites. This means that only on-campus users can access them. Off-campus users are stopped by the fact that feed readers cannot validate them to gain access to these restricted URLs. This severely limits the usefulness of RSS feeds as an alerting technology for academia. It may be that the idea behind RSS is free and open access, yet this is not always the reality.

The amazing Chris Zagar of EZproxy has come up with a solution. It's important to take a look at this, because EZproxy is so widely used in academic libraries. As solutions go, it's cumbersome. This is through no fault of Chris. The fact is, RSS is URL-based, but not delivered without the intermediary of reader software. It's clumsy when it comes to accommodating the need to authenticate.

Chris recommends adding various directives to the vendor's configuration within its EZproxy setup so that users can access restricted feeds without the need to authenticate. He explains this on his page that describes the use of something called an AnonymousURL. This includes figuring out the base URL of the RSS feeds on the restricted site. Once this updated configuration is in place, you then need to figure out the EZproxy version of the URL, that is, the URL of the RSS feed that includes a pointer to your campus proxy server. The best way to do this is to make an off-campus connection to the restricted site via an EZproxy session. (You might discover that most feeds follow a URL pattern, but it's always better to log in to the vendor's site to make sure.) The resulting RSS URL may come out looking something like this: http://www.restricted-site.com.ezproxy.yourlibrary.edu/rss/feedname.xml. This is the URL your users must subscribe to in their feed readers.

Ouch!

Imagine updating your EZproxy configurations for all vendors who offer RSS feeds, and then maintaining instructions on your library Web site that show users how to subscribe to these restricted feeds.

This is a significant barrier to the use of RSS feeds in the context of scholarly journal alerts. Will there be a better solution? Who knows. So far, the only idea I've come up with is to ask vendors to maintain their RSS feeds on domains that are not restricted. Unfortunately, this is a significant barrier for vendors.

Are there other ideas out there?