LegalPubs.ca

After Connie Crosby's Slaw post on Canadian legal publishers all stepping up to the plate with RSS feeds, I got inspired. For some time now, I've wanted to create a website that shows how useful RSS can be outside the personal reader. And with Canada being all the envy these days ;), I started to consider if Canadian legal publishing could work within a Dave Winer-River-esque type of concept? ... I was pretty sure it could, so last Friday I set out to re-mix those feeds into a dynamic, date sorted page of Canadian legal products.

And so I offer LegalPubs.ca, a site that I hope will evolve into a functional resource for law librarians, and really, anyone tasked with developing a legal research collection.

The site was put together using Yahoo Pipes and Feedburner. And in the future could filter those feeds further -- perhaps by keyword such as 'privacy' or 'copyright', or 'class actions'. The product list on the homepage will show up to 50 feed items - with each publisher capped at their 10 most recent products. (I tried to make it even ... 10 items max per publisher)

For those with personal feed readers, the combined Publisher feed is available with full text descriptions. On the website, I decided to shorten the descriptions to make it easier to read -- the page would go on-and-on otherwise. All feed item link directly into the publisher websites, where you will get the full product description, pricing, ordering, etc.

There are still some kinks to work out, which I did note on the site's About page. I've tendered the site to the CALL listserv and asked my fellow Canadian librarians for some peer feedback. If anyone else has suggestions, I'd love to hear it.