Jim O’Donnell just emailed me:

Hi Mike,

I tried commenting on your blog, but my comment seems to have been eaten by wordpress.

As of this morning, one of our searches supports RSS by adding ‘format=rss’ to the URL: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/requestHandlers/doQuickSearch.cfm?searchterm=london&format=rss

That took about 15 minutes to put together, based around the same code as our secret hidden JSON feeds:

http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/archives/2007/11/how_to_make_aja.html

I knocked it together very very quickly, so it’s not tested and may throw XML parsing errors if the output contains non-ASCII characters. I noticed that’s true of the AADL catalogue too – the accented e’s in Montreal and Quebec can screw up an XML document if not encoded properly. I think that’s the reason this doesn’t get done more often. RSS is easy to publish, but well-formed XML is tricky, particularly when your content is a bunch of text typed into a database by people who really shouldn’t have to know about character encodings and character entities and all that XML crap.

Cheers

Jim