Upgrading CERN’s Library Notifications Service

CERN’s library serves its scientists in their research endeavours, hence it is crucial that they have access to the latest publications. This project involved improving CERN’s library notification service to allows librarians to be notified of the latest releases from relevant publishers. Many publishers have existing notification channels consisting of email alerts and RSS feeds. However, these did not offer the desired customisation, so the ideal solution was to scrape publishers’ websites and fetch the title lists in the format of KBART files. The web scraper was built as a Python command line interface for usability. The program fetches the latest releases successfully for the following publishers: Cambridge University Press, Springer, and Taylor and Francis. During development, Oxford University Press and World Scientific began blocking scraping attempts, so a working solution could not be made for these publishers. For the future, it would be ideal to liaise with publishers to gain permission for scraping, so that a more comprehensive notification service can be developed.