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Thankful for Publishers Listening – Publisher RSS Feed Update

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It has been a long time coming, so I must make a big deal that we are there! The majority of English Canadian legal publishers now have feeds for their new titles.

On October 3rd Thomson Carswell sent out the message that they now have RSS feeds available. It had been in the works for a while, but they wanted to ensure they did it right, not just for the one new titles use, but for other uses as well. They started with new academic print titles, and have now moved to new and upcoming titles. The feeds are available fro this page: http://www.carswell.com/rss.

The one thing on my “wish list” would be to have something indicating the feeds’ availability somewhere from the main site. I tried to find it from the website and couldn’t, so had to go back to the announcement email I received to locate it. Nevertheless, kudos to Thomson Carswell for getting with the game!

And looking back, I see we were sorely remiss in announcing in this space that Canada Law Book, too, has RSS feeds. They have done a fantastic job making them available directly from their front page (right-hand side).

The now means the following publishers have new book titles in RSS feeds:

LexisNexis Canada
Irwin Law
CCH Canadian
Canada Law Book
Thomson Carswell

Anyone else??

What this now means:

  • anyone who has the responsibility of ordering books can now pull together all these feeds into one continuous feed, and watch for new book titles of interest from one place instead of several (such as websites, email messages about individual books, newsletters, direct mail marketing, catalogues, and publisher rep visits);
  • individuals can set up filters to sort out just those titles of interest;
  • titles filtered for specific topics could be reposted to intranet pages that cover those topic areas;
  • the law librarian associations could create some of these filtered feeds for their members, so not everyone has to reinvent the wheel;
  • Canada continues as the top country for legal publisher RSS feeds (I still have to verify this one);
  • the publishers, once they learn what an RSS feed and how to put them into place, will think of other interesting uses for this technology.

Thanks to all the publishers for listening, and making this effort. Thanks also to the librarians across the country who spoke to your publisher reps and expressed this need. It has been exciting to watch this unfold! We now have some work to do, to prove the usefulness of this tool. It is only just the beginning.

See our previous messages about this campaign:

Related – “The Tao of Law Librarianship: Using RSS Feeds for New Book Titles – Calling All Publishers,” LLRX.com (February 12, 2007)

Oct. 9/07 update: Lee Horigan, Vice President of Marketing at Thomson Carswell, has kindly pointed out to me the RSS feeds are listed from the front page under “What’s New” in the left column. I stand corrected! – Connie

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