RSS Feed Creator

From ml2sig

In my unit, the Electronic Access Unit, we research the copyright status of books scanned by Google and published in the US between 1923 and 1963. When we determine that a book is in the public domain, we report that information to Library Systems and the full text of the electronic copy is made available online. At the end of every month we have a list of barcodes which correspond to the books which are newly available online. I wanted to use this list with the Mirlyn API to create an RSS feed of these ebooks.

This is a form which creates an RSS feed from a list of barcodes, ISBNs or Aleph system IDs using the Mirlyn API. I originally designed it to create an RSS feed from barcodes with links to the online book in MBooks, rather than a link to the Mirlyn record, like other RSS feeds of library materials. I later added the option to create a feed from a list of ISBNs or Aleph system IDs with links to the Mirlyn records. I also added an option to display covers or title pages from the Google Book Search API.

I used some code from chapter 14 of Pro PHP XML and Web Services which creates an RSS object. (The book includes material on RSS 1.0 and Atom but my form only creates an RSS 2.0 feed.) I wrote code to use the Mirlyn and Google Book Search APIs to add items to the feed. The title of each item is the contents of the 245 field and the description is the 260 field from the Mirlyn record.

Here is an RSS document with the title pages. I didn't think that the title pages added much.

Here is one without graphics which has almost all of the 2000+ titles determined to be in the public domain in June.

And here is one made with ISBNs of newer material with links to Mirlyn records.

Here is the code. Note that this is just the file. You would need to put it on a server with PHP support to have it work.

David Fulmer