Aurlog

Finally, CILIP has RSS feeds for its Lisjobnet library vacancies service! Hurrah! Although the RSS Jobs Feed page still has the title Temporary Librarian Jobs RSS Feed and text saying

LIS Jobs Temps uses this technology to update you with the latest jobs as they arrive throughout the day, making sure you’re among the first to know about the jobs you’re searching for.

Which is not ideal. Presumably they copied the code from the existing temps site which has had an RSS feed for a little while.

One upshot of this, which was part of a total site redesign at CILIP, is that my own unofficial CILIP Lisjobnet RSS feed no longer works and will not be maintained. This is however no problem except for the feed’s subscribers who I will have to point in the direction of the new one.

I have now created an RSS feed for library jobs presented at CILIP’s Lisjobnet vacancies site: subscribe to http://www.aurochs.org/internet/blogging/ciliprss.php. As I’ve said before, I am amazed that the professional organisation representing those who are meant to be at the forefront of information delivery haven’t already done this. They only have a simple search interface and an email sent every fortnight. I would like to add the ability to refine the RSS feed, much as you can refine the search on the site itself, but that will have to wait until I have the time/inclination/etc. As I am not actively looking for jobs at the moment, this is not such a high priority.

That there is a clear demand for this service is shown by the fact that I’ve had an unadvertised not-fully-functional version of this working for ages, only really findable through Bloglines, and two other people (sadly anonymous) have signed up for it. It was not fully functional before as the full list of Lisjobnet vacancies is presented over an unpredictable number of separate pages (at the moment 8). The old version could only read page one, so it threw up only a handful of vacancies and ignored many of them. The new version reads the number of pages from the first page of results and then checks all of them. In the end, the final fix would have taken 2 or 3 minutes were it not for me missing off a $ in a really stupid place in the php code.

I must really stress that there are some caveats to its use: firstly, it is not official and should be taken as is. Secondly, although the prototype version has been stable in serving up jobs in the correct format, I cannot guarantee what CILIP will do to the format or availability of their vacancies: even a small change in the HTML coding will bring it down until I can correct the code. Thirdly, I have done as much testing as I can to determine whether it shows all jobs, but have not done enough testing over time to be 100% sure. Yesterday it showed all 75 jobs with no problems in Google Reader; I’m not so sure about Bloglines, but I think it is OK. If you have any findings about this let me know.

Finally, I would be very interested to know if anyone uses this RSS feed and if people find it useful or have any comments.