Library Tech Confidential

Library Playground, which I noticed thanks to a trackback commenting on a previous post here, has a really handy RSS feed of Canadian Library Technician jobs derived from a variety of job posting sites from across the country. There’s also a Facebook app version available (if you’re into that kind of thing).

I’ve just added the feed to my NetVibes account so as to keep an eye on the job market for curiosity’s sake.  This could have saved me an awful lot of obsessive bookmark-checking when I was last looking for work, as most of the sites I consulted on a daily basis are included in this mashup.

The Toronto Public Library has announced several useful improvements to its catalogue and website, most notably lists of ‘newest titles’ by audience (adult, teen, children) and type (fiction/nonfiction, graphic, large print).

Still no baked-in RSS feeds, unfortunately, and I’m not having much success producing one with Feedity or any of my other go-to scraping tools. Ah, well, I guess progress is progress.

Update: Still no luck on the ‘newest’ lists, but I have been able to come up with a feed for Toronto Public Library news scraped from this page. Hopefully some of you will find it useful (and if you do, let me know!)

A few days ago I posted about my increasing expectation that any and all content streams will be available by RSS. I was treated to further proof of my over-reliance on feeds this morning when Netvibes, my aggregator of choice, was down during breakfast.

Lately I’ve been checking Netvibes in lieu of a morning paper (though I do hit several local and non-local newspaper feeds that way) and, today, it felt exactly as though my morning paper had gone mysteriously missing. I was utterly lost.

It’s just not possible to skim the web-based version of a newspaper as you would in print; with a good feed reader and well-implemented feeds, however, it’s possible to approximate the balance between the capacity to see everything briefly at the level of headlines and ledes without overwhelming the user, while maintaining the ability to easily drill down to the content of whole articles you’re interested in.

Another lesson here is that dependence on web-based applications is risky, and that maintaining a failover option (an alternate web-based service or, gasp, a desktop-based application) is crucial for critical tasks.

You know, mission-critical tasks… like having something to read while you do the ‘ol bagel-and-coffee morning ‘nutrition’ routine.

My feed addiction has gotten to the point where I’m deeply disappointed when any given stream of content available on a database-driven website isn’t being pushed out via RSS or Atom in every conceivable circumstance… or, increasingly, when it’s only pushed out in one particular way (i.e. all posts) and cannot be customized by category.

Heck, even if your site is nothing but static HTML pages, you can hand code a bare-bones RSS feed with minimal additional effort and add significant value for your target audience. But if you’re using any modern CMS it ought to be a breeze.

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