UCLA Library Blogs

The library is ramping up on RSS Beta changes. The Beta was rolled out on March 1, and the Library has collected much information over the past six months. We really appreciate users who have sent in your feedback, which not only tells stories about your usage on RSS, but also revealed patterns of your peers. Applause!

Your feedback also makes our job in the Library much easier too. Up to this point, we have been pretty much guessing what feeds you need. Along with your feedback (anecdotal evidence), the library has another weapon to help us understand your usage preference, which is the web analytics (WA) tool (Quantified evidence). One thing I have to mention is that since RSS is a feature of Web 2.0 and most of the web analytics tools are still designed for Web 1.0 paradigm using web log analysis. So, we can only infer or interpret your behavior based on the numbers provided by our WA tool; however, it is interesting that the numbers tell us the similar stories as your feedback does. We would like to share our findings with you and let you validate them. Here is what we think:

1. Majority of you who have been using RSS feeds are from UCLA communities.
2. You prefer to subscribe to feeds that represent and correlate with your discipline.
3. If you cannot find a feed represent your discipline, you would rather monitor a broader feed which covers your
4. discipline or several feeds to cover your field; however, what you really want to do is to monitor one feed which
5. covers everything instead of many.
6. You would like to have the ability to only monitor a subset of publications from your field.
7. You want to be able to assemble your own feeds (personalized feeds which allow you to determine parameters of your feed, such as language and format).
8. You also want to have more collections added to the RSS service, such as CDs and DVDs.
9. At least, you are comfortable with RSS technology and really don’t need us to train you. 

Based on the above interpretations, we would like to offer you

1. Subject feeds (predetermined) which expand from and are mapped with fields offerred by UCLA
2. Customized feeds which enable you to assemble your own feeds.

Let us know what you think by commenting on this post.

P.S. Yesterday, Web Services Advisory Committee (WSAC) hosted a brownbag event for the Library staff. The purpose of the event is to share with our library peers on the service status, analysis on usage statistics and user feedback, and our plan for the next step. A total of 24 people attended the event and many of the attendees requested the PowerPoint Presentation, which you may find here (The gist of the presentation has provided in this post and at this moment only library staff has access to the documentation; Staff: please use your AD login).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 12:47 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.