I had a bit of an exciting breakthrough moment on Friday- very 2.0… I mentioned in one of the last posts how I invited myself along to the meeting between the library and the subject group who wanted to display their subject guide/bibliography in a modern way. I was a little worried that I hadn’t been invited, but they soon realised that they would be much better with me and I have now wopped and added that project to my mandate with relative ease. We decided on a blog to display the bibliographic search that one of the other librarians did for us- this way people could add to it, and the group, who had minimal knowledge of anything technological (one up, the library!) could manage it. So, I was working on the blog for them (after much hassle from the corporate workplace of doom which is very un- 2.0. I feel the library needs to invest in multiple copies of The Cluetrain Manifesto (a cracking book) and leave them lying around casually) and I decided that I should add an RSS feed to the sidebar so they would get all the new material on the subject. (The bibliographic search runs 2000-Jan/Feb 2008). Only, there is not one single RSS feed that would cover all their topic. And this is where my da-da moment came in- why couldn’t I mash up and filter a few RSS feeds with Yahoo Pipes and put this is my customised RSS feed in the sidebar? Ok, so it’s hardly a giant leap for mankind- but it was a small step for me and I was briefly very proud of myself! So I know have about 10 RSS feeds coming into my yahoo pipe and consequently their blog; half with one filter, 4 more with another and then I added a sprinkling of customised database searches exported to RSS feeds as a bonus- and tada lists! A customised RSS feed! The only thing that worries me now is archiving or storing all the good material that comes up on that RSS feed. Hmm, I guess I need to dust off that RSS/Bloglines class from last year, really.

Now if only I was within earshot of some real bagpipes to triumphantly pipe in the idea-

Fair fa your honest sonsie face, great chieftain of the yahoo pipes race…