Canadian Company First to Provide Freely Accessible ONIX-XML Service to Libraries And Booksellers

(Quebec City, QC) Nearly a year before the publication of their flagship title “Technological Revolution as Political Coup d’État” SPACEPOL Academic Publishers uploaded complete bibliographical data on the IT public administration textbook to their website. In fact, the company went so far as to syndicate it as XML feeds in order to make the more accessible to librarians and book databases. XML is an acronym for extensible mark-up language, a flexible text format used most often displaying newswire and weblog (blog) content. The resulting SPACEPOL bookblog or “biblioblog” as the company’s CEO Gunnar K. A. Njalsson refers to it, contains bibliographic data, authority records data and ONIX data important to the major bookseller databases such as Bowker, Nielsen, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Quality questions have also been addressed by the small Quebec- and Finland-based publishing and consulting house which specialises in subjects such as Space Law and government Innovation Policy. The publishers’ CEO points out that “we have scrutinized the quality of our XML feeds through BookNet Canada, Bowker, Nielsen, Amazon and Barnes & Noble. In fact, we were amongst the first Canadian publishers to be certified at the highest level (Gold) by BookNet Canada for our XML ONIX data.”

Bibliographical and authority data in MARC XML format are available free online to libraries, booksellers and anyone with an aggregator. The company updates the records regularly so that they contain the most recent data about a book or author, including changes to the estimated release dates for various titles. Surprisingly, despite the wide acceptance in the publishing community of the new standards, the SPACEPOL Biblioblog would appear to be a little ahead of its time.

“Many booksellers are used to receiving book information files in ONIX format or simply querying the publisher directly. Of course we’re open to customer service in all formats. However, we’ve noticed that a large number of book databases are not familiar with the benefits of a biblioblog. For example, they can access and updated information whenever they want. In addition, any bookseller database or library anywhere in the world can directly access the biblioblog and immediately have relevant cataloguing data in the correct format. This is particularly useful when a library or bookseller is looking for certain types of textbooks and the publisher is not aware that the library or bookseller’s database even exists”, Njalsson explains.

The SPACEPOL Biblioblog has been in existence and serving librarians and booksellers since 2005 and is quickly growing in popularity. Libraries in Argentina, Chile, Norway, Sweden, Canada and even Australia and New Zealand have used the service and described it as easy and accurate. SPACEPOL Academic Publishers is currently developing other innovative services to better serve the community of librarians and booksellers. More information can be found at the corporate website:

http://www.spacepol.ca

The SPACEPOL Biblioblog can be viewed from the site’s “Libraries” page which has been designed to assist librarians and booksellers.