syndicatedContent

Main Articles: 'Syndicated content: it's more than just some file formats?', Ariadne Issue 35:

There is, unsurprisingly, an increasing recognition that digital resources of all kinds are eminently suitable to repurposing and reuse. The Iconex Project [1], for example, was funded under JISC's 5/99 Programme to look at the creation, storage and dissemination of reusable learning objects. Service providers of the Arts & Humanities Data Service [2] concern themselves with collecting the digital outputs of scholarly activity in order to preserve them for posterity, but also with facilitating their ongoing use and reuse by learners, teachers and researchers across the community [3]. International developments such as the Open Archives Initiative [4] explicitly recognise the value of sharing metadata about resources with any number of service providers in order to raise visibility, and draw greater attention to the underlying resources.

As the presentation frameworks generically labelled as 'portals' continue to gain ground across the community, there will be an increasing requirement for reusable content of all forms, whether drawn from within the organisation building the portal or gathered from elsewhere. Work on the PORTAL Project [5], funded under the JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme [6] is raising issues relating to the reuse and reintegration of digital resources of various forms, specifically in the context of 'surfacing' these resources within institutional portals.

In this article, a number of these issues will be explored. For the sake of simplicity, and because of the ready availability of helpful visual examples, the bulk of the article will concern itself with RSS-based 'news feeds' [7]. Many of the issues raised, though, are more generically applicable, and will be revisited in greater detail through deliverables from the PORTAL Project itself.

Readers who are already comfortable with RSS may wish to skip straight to the suggestions for good practice... Those who are interested in making use of the potential offered by RSS, but without infrastructure such as a portal to display feeds of interest, might be interested in RSS-xpress-Lite from UKOLN [8], which allows RSS to be displayed in traditional Web pages with the use of a single line of Javascript.