ADD SOME “WOW” TO YOUR PUBLICATIONS LISTING WITH GOOGLE MAPS©

We have all used Google Maps^© to find our way around town. At the Natural Resources Canada Library, we are using it to highlight the geospatial extent of our new publications. Lat me show how, it won't take Long.

The NRCan Library maintains GEOSCAN, the bibliographic search engine for the publications of the Earth Sciences Sector of Natural Resources Canada. In 2008, the Earth Sciences Sector's largest publisher, the Geological Survey of Canada, changed the way they advertised their new and upcoming publications. They stopped producing their monthly web pages and stopped maintaining their email distribution list of clientele. In its place, the NRCan Library implemented a “New Releases” button that drew directly from the GEOSCAN database and added an RSS feed to apprise the clientele of the new publications.

Drawing on the latitude and longitude metadata in the GEOSCAN records, the RSS feed was enhanced with GeoRSS Simple encoding to allow the geographic coverage of these publications to be displayed with Google Maps^©. Our clients expressed a certain “wow” factor as the publications' footprints were displayed at the click of a button.

I will illustrate how we implemented our GeoRSS feed and its link to Google Maps^© without having to know a lot about XML and RSS feeds.