Canada’s Weekly Checklist
Librarians will know about the federal government’s Weekly Checklist of Canadian Government Publications, but I thought others might like to learn of its existence. A product of Government of Canada Publications, the checklist provides subscribing Depository Libraries with a list of those official publications from all organizations including Parliament that are catalogued and sent out to them — and incidentally informs the rest of us as well.
Most useful to this “rest” will be the sub-list of publications available online: see, for example, the electronic list for publications available as of last week.
The whole Government of Canada Publications website was upgraded and redesigned last week, integrating the Weekly Checklists better into the main site. But I was surprised to see that the new version offers no RSS feed or email feed of these useful checklists. And when I spoke to a representative, I was told that there were no immediate plans to provide such feeds. Accordingly, if you are not a depository library — and which among us is? — you’ll have to remember to visit the Checklist page each week, if you want to see what your government has published. Moreover, because there’s no XML feed, you won’t be able to use the data in the creative ways that this format makes possible.
This is, frankly, stupid. And I would hope that notwithstanding what I’ve been told it’s corrected soon.
Thanks for this post about the weekly checklist, I wasn’t aware of it.
As a workaround for the lack of a feed, you can, if you use google Reader, create a feed for any changes to the webpage. So at least you can use your reader (if it’s google – I’m not aware of any other readers that do this, though they may be out there) to be notified of updates to the page. Just paste the page url into the ‘Add a subscription’ box and reader will create a ‘feed’ for the page.
Thanks for your suggestion, Vivian. I keep forgetting about Google Reader’s ability to do this. The difficulty in this case is that each new Weekly Checklist is given a unique URL, and the first stable URL higher up contains no useful data—other than the fact that there’s a new checklist. It’s as though the site builder wanted to frustrate any attempt to “scrape” the site in this way.