From the ask-and-ye-shall-receive department:

So just the other day I was griping in this space that our online catalog won’t even do spelling suggestions, let alone the nifty “get more results with fewer keywords” suggestion from eBay. Today in my email is a message from our systems librarian saying that our III catalog, Tiger, has been upgraded to release 2006LE. Looking at Jenny Levine’s post from June entitled Innovative Gets Busy!, I see that, among other features, spell checking on catalog searches is included in this release. Cool. I’ll let you know how well it actually works.

The main thing that had me already excited about this release was its support for RSS. Now we will be able to display existing RSS feeds on catalog pages without resorting to FeedBurner or other third-party RSS-to-HTML converters. And, much more importantly, it looks like this release will allow us to create RSS feeds for patron information (“books I have checked out” with due dates) and new title lists (see page 8 of the III June newsletter (PDF) for “details,” if you can call them that). I think this all comes bundled with this release, but I believe that III also has some kind of paid add-on incorporating RSS, too, so I can’t be sure.

The main reason I can’t be sure is that III’s web site isn’t very helpful. You’d think they’d have a big, prominent web page telling us how fab their new release is, but I can’t find anything that isn’t part of a PDF newsletter. Bleah.

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