Steve Matthews of Stem shows “how useful RSS can be outside the personal reader” with LegalPubs.ca, “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 … 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.

What Steve demonstrates is close to the heart of anyone convinced of the power of “free” information. By “free” here I don’t mean (necessarily) free to air, but free in the sense that it is published in open standards (or as web services) to suit the needs of those requesting it.

Understandably, most publishers are currently vexed by the question how best to exploit their proprietary information: how much to give away and how much to lock up behind subscription paywalls. But where there are no proprietorial issues, there is no sense in being proprietorial. New book information is promotional information the publishers want to circulate as widely as possible. So long as such information is not free, ie remains locked up in the publishers’ own formats (their own web pages, spreadsheets, pdfs etc), as is the case with all UK law publishers, it is of very limited value. Unlock it by publishing it as RSS feeds like the good folks in Canada and people like Steve and me will pick up the ball and run with it, developing innovative services that do more for the publisher than the publisher could ever do themselves.

Update: To add your voice to a Campaign for UK Law Publishers’ RSS Feeds, post a comment on the subsequent Dear Publisher post and join lo-fi’s Facebook group.