The 24 Hour Museum Tunable RSS News Feed

Jonathan Pratty, 24 Hour Museum, United Kingdom
http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/home.rss

Session: Publication Models

This paper follows on from an earlier offering, 'RSS - the 24 Hour Museum News feed' (Pratty, 2004) presented to Museums and the Web in 2004. That paper outlined some of the background to RSS culture and demonstrated the successful build and deployment of the UK's first Museum and Gallery news feed service by the 24 Hour Museum (www.24hourmuseum.org.uk) and System Simulation Ltd of London (www.ssl.co.uk). Version 1.0 of the RSS feed (www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/home.rss ) is working, and in January 2005, technical partners SSL developed the feed into a multi-region, multi-city, tunable content feed, capable of offering tailored output to meet specific editorial needs of the 24 HM Web site, as well as of partners in the museum sector and beyond in the UK. The paper examines the technical challenges such expansion involves. Questions about RSS version choice, scoping, determining the logistics problems and operational decisions are explored. Since this paper proposal was submitted in September 2004, there's been a gratifying leap in the popularity of RSS as a mass publishing mechanism. The writer feels the growing momentum behind the technology grandly justifies the 24 Hour Museum's initial investment in the technology in 2003 and our continued commitment to the format. A final section of the paper deals with this gathering enthusiasm within the Web world and looks at brief case studies of other museums starting to use RSS.