Edward Iglesias wrote:
> Well there have been some postings recently on SIRSI adopting RSS
> technology.  See
> http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2005/01/19/sirsi_breaks_open_the_rss_flood_gates.html
>
> Eric Lease Morgan wrote:>
>> If I understand the concept, I have tried to do this as a part of the
>> (incomplete) Ockham Alerting Service. The Service allows you to query
>> an index, and the search results are then available as HTML, email, or
>> an RSS feed. When the content in the index gets refreshed, the RSS feed
>> will return different results every time. The operative word here is
>> "when". See:>>
>>   http://alert.ockham.org/

I think I *get* the notion of search results as RSS feed.  And I respect
Eric's "when" qualifier.  I even like some of the things being suggested
in the SIRSI announcement and discussion posted on Shifted Librarian.

What I was particularly thinking of was stuff that we would, in the
pre-Spam/phish era of email, have only considered emailing (and, in many
cases, still do of course):
        hold notifications
        overdue notifications
        profile based SDI reports (e.g. new books or articles in *)
        targeted announcements (by location, status, etc.)
When dealing with individual patrons, I'm assuming that we need to
authenticate in order to respect (or at least acknowledge) their right
to privacy. (how much privacy with email is a different thread)

Could any/many of the different classes of RSS readers deal with a
standard web authentication scheme? standalone? embedded in email
clients? embedded in browsers?

Walter Lewis
Halton Hills