Exciting news from the world of ILS’s [as reported by Jenny at The Shifted Librarian]!

I’ve been crawling out of my skin with anticipation, waiting to be able to announce this, and now it’s finally official! Sirsi will be the first ILS vendor to offer native RSS feeds out of the catalog, and they’ve gone the whole nine yards in terms of searching! On the Press Releases page, initial information can be found in the Sirsi Enterprise Portal Solution featuring Sirsi Rooms 2.0 PDF document. There should be a feature-based press release up soon, but here are some early details.

The feeds will be part of their Rooms 2.0 and Enterprise Portal Solution (ESP) release around March. Features will include:

* The ability to take any OPAC search strategy and convert it into an RSS feed. Because text search engine for our ILS system enables a user to embed MARC and other field codes in the search string, a user could construct a search that searches against title, author, subject, ISBN {020} and any other indexed field within the ILS.
* The ability to create an RSS feed based on a search of any sources within SingleSearch, Sirsi’s MuseGlobal (Gary’s sponsor) based federated search product (EBSCO, LoCZ, etc.).
* The ability to create an RSS feed of Google results.
* The ability to create an RSS feed of our ‘Best of the Web’.
* The ability to sort the results by date, author, title, or relevance, where applicable.

Rock on Sirsi! It’s about time! I’m sure we’ll see a lot of similar innovations from Sirsi’s competitors very soon. 🙂