jamespmullan
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01:57:32 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
Has anyone seen or got any documentation on how Law Librarians can use RSS? I’ve been asked by a legal publisher for some input on how they can market RSS to Law Librarians
law.librarians
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jrbeatty 2:50 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
How about this one? http://www.schwabe.com/library/rss_tutorials.htm
It’s flash video, not text, though.
shucha 2:56 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
I presented on this topic at AALL last July. As it was a TS-SIS program, my focus was primarily on tech services librarians. My PPT is up on Scribd.
I also did a presentation at ORALL on blogs and RSS back in 2005. It’s a bit old, but I’d be happy to share the PPT for that upon request.
connie 3:28 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
How ironic, considering law librarians have been asking publishers for RSS. ;-)
Here’s my short list:
Top 10 Uses for RSS in Law Firms by Steve Matthews (Vancouver Law Librarian Blog)
Dear Publisher – we want RSS now! by Nick Holmes (Binary Law blog)
Law Pipes – by Nick Holmes
LegalPubs.ca – review by Simon Fodden over at Slaw about Steve Matthew’s site LegalPubs.ca
Thankful for Publishers Listening – Publisher RSS Feed Update – by Connie Crosby at Slaw
The Tao of Law Librarianship: Using RSS Feeds for New Book Titles – Calling All Publishers – by Connie Crosby at LLRX.com
This is a start–I bet there is lots more out there!
Cheers,
Connie
jamespmullan 3:32 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
I think it’s great that they are asking for advice, although bizzarely they have already rolled out their RSS feeds.
They also indicated that they had already spoken to a couple of Law Librarians who said they knew what RSS was but that there weren’t sure how to use it.
iOverlord 3:54 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
Interesting. I think, the ‘how can I use it’ question is now more common that ‘what is it’ question. From a marketing point of view they should market it as time saving, ensuring you never miss the latest information, and as someone much smarter than me once said, your inbox for the web. Think Bonnie and Connie have listed some good stuff. More generally I always point people at the commoncraft ‘plain english’ videos.
connie 4:14 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
yes, I think now that we have people’s heads around what RSS is, there is a big gap with regard to what we can do with it. It goes beyond reading feeds in Google Reader. Steve’s LegalPubs.ca site is a good example of what can be done to start. Nick’s Law Pipes is another. The trick is that Yahoo Pipes isn’t that easy to learn (or at least, I couldn’t just pick it up in an hour).
How can we inspire people? I want to actually create a course on this topic–put have so much to learn myself still!
jennielaw 4:17 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
In terms of book publishers, it would also be cool to get the real publishing time info on books. So often, you order in advance of publication, and then you realise a month after it should have come out, that it’s nowhere to be seen.
So you phone up, and find publication’s slipped by 2 months…then you phone up again a few months later, and find it’s slipped again…
A feed with updates on publication status, not just ‘we publish this lovely book’ would be nice, and would mean we could stop saying “Yes, I know there’s adverts for it blanketing the legal journals and claiming it’s in print, but they’re not quite accurate. We did order it ages ago, but no, we have no real idea when it’ll actually be printed”!
jamespmullan 4:20 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
Connie, iOverlord, thanks for your comments.
I get the impression certainly in the UK at least that the use of RSS feeds by Law Librarians is not signficant, there are certainly some excellent examples of individuals using feeds but there hasn’t yet been widespread adoption of RSS. Take for instance a talk at lasts year’s BIALL Conference where someone was asked whether they used Blogs/RSS for compiling their current awareness service, the answer was a resounding no.
We also have the issue that people cant access these technologies because of restrictions applied by their IT Departments. Having said that I think the question is now “how” rather then “What”
connie 4:21 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
The publishers I have talked to who have set up new book title feeds say that, now that they know how to set up the technology, they are thinking about how else they can use it. Which was one of our ulterior motives for starting with something very specific. Jennie’s suggestion is a good idea. What else could they be using RSS for?
It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. We need to know what types of feeds are available to know what to do with them. Publishers need to know what we are going to do with them to know what kind to produce…
Jim Milles 4:32 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
Hmm… I suspect if someone claims they know what RSS is but they don’t know what they can do with it, they don’t really know what it is.
lo-fi 4:44 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
@James “bizzarely they have already rolled out their RSS feeds.” Where are they? Let me at ‘em!
As far as marketing goes, if they’ve already got some sort of RSS set up they should beta test with some people who know how to use it (that’s us) and then, at least initially, let the librarians spread the word.
@Connie How to inspire people? I think the whole “syndication” thing can be a little bit too techie. Google Reader/Bloglines is the selling point. I showed a colleague how to set up a Google Reader account and they ran with it!
I agree with Connie that with this sort of stuff you need to be able to jump in and see how it is working for you. Wildys are still experimenting with their feed in terms of how they update and how regularly etc, but they have done an excellent job of spreading the word and asking for feedback. This is a model law publishers should be copying.
jennielaw 4:46 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
At least at this years BIALL there’ll be one small voice at least saying they use RSS feeds.
I take all the relevant Gov depts feeds, both UK and Scottish, and throw in their press release information into our current awareness service :-)
connie 4:47 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
What I mean is, there are a lot of possibilities for mashing things up, filtering, etc. In theory I know what I can do with RSS, but I haven’t physically done them. I do know what RSS is, how to feed it into an aggregator, how to create new feeds from that. But there are wider possibilities to explore.And I’m one of the ones with an imagination. A lot of people need very specific examples to see the possibilities.
neilstewart 5:15 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
Pageflakes, Netvibes or iGoogle is a good example of what can be done very quickly with RSS feeds to produce a tangible and useful result, I think. People can generally get the idea of RSS in action when they see it creating what is recognisably a web page. Once you’ve got that idea, the likes of Yahoo Pipes seems far less intimidating. I did have a “Eureka!” moment with RSS when I finally realised what the big deal was, and imaginative but simple things like the above services can help with this.
Steve 6:34 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
Take any feed source and run it though feedrinse.com for an example of filtering.
I’ve been using Yahoo Pipes for feed mixing (combining feeds to 1 feed). It’s slower, but it also works well on combining 50+ sources.
Steve 6:37 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
I think there’s a real potential with RSS for constructing current awareness collections.
As librarians, we can often find lots of great RSS sources, and then mixing them down to a single new RSS url that we can hand to clients, has to be valuable.
nickholmes 7:01 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
@James – “I’ve been asked by a legal publisher for some input on how they can market RSS to Law Librarians”
@Connie – “ironic”
I think this blog, lo-fi’s Facebook group etc are clear evidence that a large number of leading law librarians and other legal info geeks don’t need to be sold RSS; they are just waiting for it to be delivered. In the Web 2.0 world, if you give RSS to this minority, they will soon sell it to the majority.
It is beyond belief that the publishers can produce web pages with this info but cannot/do not yet see the benefit in generating the RSS equivalent.
So it is the case that RSS still needs to be sold to the publishers. James has made headway with S&M. Has anyone else had significant dialogue with any other publisher?
BTW Sorry to be thick, but how do I get to be a Contributor?
lo-fi 7:19 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
Nick,
Email me! You just need a WordPress account and to let me know the email you signed up with. I can add you as an admin. Be great to have you!
jennielaw 7:33 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
I’m wondering if smaller publishers would be more easily persuaded into feeds than larger ones?
And the larger ones would then feel sufficiently out of the loop to leap into catching up?
I’m having thoughts about contacting our independent Scots law publisher, which is run by some nice, friendly people…my only problem is, I’m not sure they’d have the time / staffing /technical skills to do anything much, and I know I don’t have the knowledge to do much more than suggest!
lo-fi librarian» Blog Archive » law.librarians 9:07 pm on February 21, 2008 | # |
[...] having a central place for discussion is kind of neat. A great example of how this is working is a recent post from James Mullen on legal publishers and [...]
Marianne Barber 2:00 pm on February 22, 2008 | # |
We’re very keen to get RSS feeds from legal publishers (which is why I’m so pleased this group has been started and apologies for not adding my comments sooner.) Our Acquisitions Manager spends a great deal of time and energy each week hunting through the various websites for information particularly on new editions. Penguin, Orion Books and Palgrave Macmillan already do have RSS (I went to a UKeig seminar on this over a year ago.)However, we get very few books from any of these publishers so haven’t used their feeds (although we do use RSS from other sources for news and current awareness.) I would agree with the comment that we must be able to rely on the feeds to tell us about publication slippage. We used to order new editions as soon as the fliers came round but don’t do this any more as it played havoc with our accounting systems when publication dates (often) went over into another year.
I presume that through James the UK legal publishers are now aware of the interest in RSS?
lo-fi 2:15 pm on February 22, 2008 | # |
Hi Marianne,
James has been in contact with Sweet and Maxwell (and possibly others, he’s a busy bee). It’s great to have your input. Would you be interested in contributing to law.librarians?
lo-fi