RSS/Atom

RSS and Atom feeds are both standards for providing feeds of information from repositories. Both these standards enable internet users to keep up to date with new content on numerous websites without having to visit each individual site. Repositories can be configured to provide information to users about new repository content via RSS or Atom.

How do RSS and Atom work?

Both RSS and Atom are XML-based standards that work by pulling information together for the user, for display remotely in feed readers. Websites can offer feeds for the entire site or for specific parts of the site. For example, in a repository, there may be a feed to display any new article that gets added, and there may also be feeds that only show items for a specific author or a specific department.

Software and services designed to manage and display RSS and ATOM feeds are available as desktop software, web-based services and services or software for mobile devices. Software or services that manage RSS and Atom are commonly called feed readers or aggregators.

In practice a feed is an alternative version of a webpage that displays all of the latest additions to the website in RSS or Atom XML. The URL for this XML page can be added into feed readers which will display the XML in a user-friendly way and update users about any new content on the website.

Websites that offer RSS or Atom feeds for their updates normally display a link saying RSS, Atom or Feed or the RSS logo: somewhere on the relevant page.

RSS and Atom feeds usually contain metadata about new content such as title, url, author, abstract etc, but they can also be used to contain the full text of the content, this is most common in RSS and Atom feeds from blogs.

The feeds do not work in real-time, there is a delay between updates on a site and the item appearing in a feed.

What's the difference between RSS and Atom?

To find out more about the differences between RSS and Atom, visit the Atom Wikipedia page

RSS and Atom are competing standards and there are technical differences in the ways that the two standards work. However this should not be a major concern to repository managers since on the surface, both do a largely similar job and sites can offer either or both as options for people who want feeds of the latest content.

The Atom feed standard is related to the Atom publishing protocol used by SWORD.

How can RSS and Atom be used?

At its simplest RSS and Atom feeds can be used to update users on change to a website via software such as feed readers. However RSS and Atom are very versatile and can be used in a number of ways both by end-users and by other pieces of software.

Here are some examples of RSS and Atom being used in interesting ways for repositories:

• Feeds can be embedded in other websites. So for example a departmental website can display all the latest content added to the repository. Feeds can also be embedded as plain text or can be used to display more attractive visualisations of repository content. See Les Carr's blog as an example

• Feeds can be combined using a service such as Yahoo! Pipes so that feeds from a number of places can be offered as one feed. This may be useful for combining repository updates with updates from other institutional or subject sources

• Feeds can be used to pull content into other places. Les Carr has an example of this with MS PowerPoint

• RSS feeds can be used to push content into other places as well, some people have chosen to link their repository feeds to twitter accounts so that a message is sent to twitter every time a new item is added. This could obviously be done using subject feeds rather than the whole repository feed

• Services such as Tabbloid can turn feeds into a PDF newsletter which can then be emailed to people

• The JISC/HE Academy UKOER pilot programme investigated the possibility of using RSS feeds to submit items to the Jorum Repository (the national service for learning and teaching materials). This provided an interesting testbed and is discussed in John Robertson's JISC Cetis blog.

These are just a few examples, there are a lot of ways RSS and Atom feeds can be used to provide useful services to the end-user.