The purpose of LegalPubs.ca is to produce a one stop showcase of the products offered by Canadian legal publishers. Using RSS technology, I have mixed the 10 latest items for each of the publishers listed below. Each entry is passed along unmodified from the publisher’s original feed, and simply sorted by date to produce a ‘dynamic watchable list‘ of the latest products available. The main page of the site also includes the linked headlines for each feed as an individual source. The publishers included in this aggregation currently are:

• Irwin Law
• CCH Canadian
• Lexis Nexis Canada
• Carswell
• First Reference

I expect the primary audience for legalpubs.ca to be law librarians, and hope this effort will help reduce the mountain of paper advertisements many librarians regularly receive. It may also prove valuable to solo practitioners and lawyers in small firms who are tasked with creating their own research collections.

Finally, this is not an exclusive club. If you know of an RSS feed that includes the products offered by another Canadian legal publisher, please let me know

- Steve Matthews

Notes on the Aggregation Process:

• To reduce the size of this list, each publisher’s feed is sorted by date, and truncated to the 10 most recent RSS entries (done via Yahoo Pipes, in case you were interested). At launch, the list is fluctuating between 40 & 50 entries.
• Because the feeds are truncated to the latest 10 entries prior to mixing, each publisher should have 10 spots on the list. If the publisher’s feed was less than 10 items, the size of the overall list would drop, but each publisher will remained capped at 10 spots. (at least that’s the theory…)
• Some of the entries are simply headline feeds (typically the title of the book or product), and some include full text descriptions. This is entirely up to each publisher, and what they are prepared to offer within their product feeds.
• Some of the RSS feeds do not include date information, which is causing them to bunch up and at times move down the list. As the Publisher’s feeds become more sophisticated, this will likely sort itself out.

Wouldn’t it be great if…

Got an idea to expand this site? A way it could be more helpful? Please leave a comment below.