Ken at RSS4Lib points to a really neat-looking tool called FeedTier that, given a URL, will attempt to create an RSS feed for that page.
Coming back from the Access conference another librarian and I were wondering how we could have our electronic reserves readings automagically appear in BlackBoard, and this tool almost does the trick. Actually it does exactly what’s expected, but our reserves module is causing the links to timeout, so it’s a problem to fix on our end, but you might want to run a few experiments if you have some content you’d like to shove into your course management system.
Just to give you an idea, I gave FeedTier this link that leads to a list of readings available for one course in our electronic reserves module and it gave me back this RSS feed. Go ahead and plug that in to your aggregator to see how pretty it looks. Now think about plugging that URL in to Feed2JS (or similar), pasting the code into a BlackBoard course and you’re all set! If another document is added to the reserve reading list, it will automatically show up in the BlackBoard course shell.
Now I have to figure out how to bribe our programmer so the links to the actual documents don’t time out….