Rick’s Rants and Raves

I totally love the Columbus library. With recent upgrades to their catalog search, you can now get your own RSS feeds for new materials in just about any topic in any way. The library staff have done a pretty good job of explaining the basics here. I’ve come up with a few custom RSS feeds:

• New Books on CD
• New DVDs
• New Kids DVDs
• New Rock CDs
• New Teen Graphic Novels

The possibilities are just about endless.

The library’s explanation is good for reasonably narrow searches, but here’s one point that they don’t make: on the advanced search page, you can change the format to, for example, DVD, and then search with no other qualifier. The result page has lots of category selections on the right to help you narrow down to a favorite genre or time period. Or, in the example below, I’ve left it wide open. Then click the RSS feeds button in the upper right of the results section to get your custom-built RSS feed. Very nice.