I would love it if Matthews Medical Books and Rittenhouse developed an RSS feed of listing newly published medical books. I got the idea yesterday while looking at some other library (not medical) blogs. The authors of the blogs used Library Thing to display current books they are reading along the side of their blog. I thought it would be great to do the same thing on my blog but instead have a list of newly published medical books.

I searched both Matthews Medical Books and Rittenhouse and I could not find anything on their site where they have email alert system or an RSS feed for newly published books. Both sites feature new books but only on their web site. Why do I have to go to their web site to look at what's new? Shouldn't they have a service that I can sign up for and which sends me an alert of what's newly available on the market? I realize the amount of books that are published is probably pretty huge, perhaps that list would be too big to send out or display. However, they could display new books that were Brandon Hill Titles, titles that have 3 stars in Doody Core Titles in Health Sciences, or most bought titles.

I have noticed that some public libraries have RSS feeds displaying newly acquired and cataloged materials on their web page. That would be very nice to have. I suspect these libraries did some neat little coding on the web site from their catalog to accomplish this cool feature. Perhaps academic medical libraries and other hospitals that have a little more freedom on their intranet sites could do this too. Smaller hospital libraries, ones without the technical staff, or ones without a lot of intranet development freedom may not be able to easily do this, it really depends on their situation.

Drawing people to the resources that is what it is all about.