Note that by starting with the RSS feed, and not the raw item, you’re missing out on a lot of field information, as in metadata. One thing we can do is ask you folks how to make our RSS items more robust. But for your needs you may think about bypassing RSS altogether, though the advantage is it’s RSS and it’s easy. Basically what we need is a simple way to query for last-updated items that takes full benefit of our metadata–quite a bit of which is not stored in the item record itself in the new system, but in an associated table (that’s true for LC subjects, for example). Maybe do both? How can we communicate back to the cataloger community for input on this?

We roll out the new site sometime this month (God willing). At that point you should look at our feed and our live items all over again and also get a walk-through from me of the item innards. Additionally, we have a LII-to-MODS mapping you would find very illuminating–though note it’s limited to item fields, just to keep it simple. I’ll post it on FRL by tomorrow, along with a sneak preview of the new item detail in the new forthcoming LII. It’s meta-licious.

NOTE: I can’t actually write this stuff, I just think I know enough about it to think that this could be done by someone who would know how!

The RSS feed from LII is a listing of the new records seen as a URL to the unique LII record number, as well as a title and description. rdf:li rdf:resource=”http://lii.org/search?goto=025969“/
rdf:li rdf:resource=”http://lii.org/search?goto=007825“/
rdf:li rdf:resource=”http://lii.org/search?goto=026533“/
What would be really nice is if that reference number, for instance 007825 (which refers to a site about Canadian public holidays), was an indexed field in LII. The LII record for 007825 tells me that the information was last updated on “Jun 30, 2005,” but without being able to easily query for just record 007825, it is currently a bit messier trying to find that last updated date. It can be done by using the “permenant” link for commenting on a record: e.g. http://lii.org/search?comment=007825. Since this is a standard (for now) URL built from the item number I can strip from the RSS feed, I can automate the checking of the comment URL through a link resolver. A fancy script could probably review the results to find the string following the phrase “last updated” to check the date. Since I know the date of the RSS feed and when I added items to my catalog, I can set up checkpoints at various times to see if a record has been updated. I can also check for deletions of records by seeing if the comment URL for a specific item resolves back to the front LII page. Now, I am not checking for the resolution of the link the LII record points to (maybe it is still a valid URL but has become an inappropriate site), but rather that LII still has a pointer to that resource.