RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a standard data format that allows clients (usually called readers or aggregators) to easily display and keep track of headlines or brief stories from a number of websites all at once. A group of the latest headlines from a website delivered via RSS is known as an RSS feed.

RSS readers make it really easy for you to be updated on the latest stories or alerts from your favorite websites without having to visit each site manually.

Nearly all major news sites, including the Seattle Times, Yahoo News, CNN and NPR, provide a wide variety of feeds on different news topics. In addition, more and more non-news sites are starting to offer RSS.

There are many good free RSS readers that can be downloaded. FeedReader and SharpReader are two popular free ones for Windows, and NetNewsWire and AmphetaDesk are popular choices for Macintosh. The Firefox web browser also includes support for RSS feeds.

There are also several third party websites which you can read your RSS feeds from. Three of the most popular are Bloglines, My MSN and My Yahoo!

RSS is a standard format, so SPL’s RSS feeds should work with any RSS reader. However, the Seattle Public Library does not support or endorse any one in particular.

The Seattle Public Library provides three types of RSS feeds. The first type is a feed of items checked out from the library. This allows you to keep track of your library books through your RSS reader. Several days before an item is overdue, you will get a new story alerting you that the book will soon be due with a link to the catalog so you can log in and renew the item if you want to hang on to it. This feature is especially useful if you want to keep track of several peoples’ items out at the same time, for instance for your children or other family members.

Your items out feed is available from within your account. Log into My Account and go to the Items Out page. At the top of the page, there is an orange button. Click on this button. It will open the feed up in your web browser. You can then take the URL in your browser's window and put it into the RSS reader of your choice.

The second type of feed is one of the items you have on hold from the library. This helps you keep track of when your holds are ready for pickup. Please keep in mind that you may get a notification that a hold is ready for pickup before the hold is actually waiting for you. This is because the new story is generated when the hold makes it to your library branch, not when it actually gets put on the holds shelf.

Like the items out feed, you need to log into My Account. Go to the Holds page. At the top of the page, there is an orange button. Click on this button. It will open the feed up in your web browser. You can then take the URL in your browser's window and put it into the RSS reader of your choice.

SPL also offers feeds based upon nearly any search you can do from within our catalog. This allows you to be notified when a new item on a topic you are interested in or by your favorite author becomes available.

At the bottom of every brief summary screen of search results in the catalog you will see an orange XML button which will give you a feed of the search that you just performed.

You can also construct your own feed. For instance, the following URL will give you a feed of the last 10 items containing the term "film noir" added to the catalog:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss?term=film+noir

Every time a new item containing the term "film noir" is added to the catalog, you will get a new story in your RSS reader.

And the following will give you a feed of the most recently published 100 items in our catalog containing the name Stephen King:

https://catalog.spl.org/rss?term="Stephen King"&index=name&npp=100

More complex feeds are best constructed by doing the appropriate search through the catalog and then taking the RSS feed provided as a link at the bottom of the screen.

http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml is a very good basic overview of RSS.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html?page=1 provides a more technical explanation of the topic.