Sarah Johnson writes “Lisjobs.com (http://www.lisjobs.com) and Library Job Postings on the Internet (http://www.libraryjobpostings.org), the largest collection of free online library-related job postings, are pleased to announce our improved and updated combined job listings page at http://www.lisjobs.com/jobs/index.asp.
For job seekers: If you have our old jobs page bookmarked, please change your bookmarks now and use the new site at http://www.lisjobs.com/jobs/index.asp. Also, our RSS feed has changed. Please access the new RSS feed for job listings at http://www.lisjobs.com/rss.asp.
For employers: we are now accepting all job postings through the online form at http://www.lisjobs.com/jobform.asp. We are no longer accepting e-mailed job ads; all ads must be submitted through the form. Ads are subject to approval and will appear online within 24 hours after receipt. Employers are now also able to specify closing dates, when the ad will be removed from our database.
These changes should better serve everyone; ads will be posted more quickly after receipt, and will appear individually in the RSS feed as posted. Questions or comments? E-mail [email protected].”
rss feed
These changes should better serve everyone; ads… will appear individually in the RSS feed as posted.
Actually, this is extremely annoying. The new feed is spamming my RSS aggregator. I wonder who thought this was a good idea?
Re:rss feed
We emailed about this earlier today, but since you also posted to LISNews, I feel obligated to say something here, too…
Any problems you have (and anyone else has) with the RSS feed are temporary. Yesterday was the first full day of operation for the new site. Some changes were made to the submission form and the RSS feed yesterday, and as a result, some of the jobs may appear in some aggregators more than once.
As for who thought this was a good idea, and why – well, manually entering over 10,000 job ads over a period of 9+ years means a heck of a lot of typing. This new site saves us a TON of work. You don’t know how glad I am that the job submission process is finally automated. The big rush of ads in early January nearly killed my hands. Also, it’s the norm for job sites, at least those that have RSS feeds, to list each job as a separate item. So, we’re finally getting with the program now.
Any problems you had with the feed will be resolved very soon, I suspect, if they haven’t been already. I just checked, and it all looks fine to me in Bloglines.
Re:rss feed
Sarah pretty much said it — I’m not sure also why it’s so different for 5 job listings to appear as 5 individual entries when you go into your aggregator, as opposed to one entry with 5 links in it. If you look at the feeds from the CHE, etc., they’re set up this way as well.
We switched to this automated process after several years of reposting e-mailed ads; this was necessary to keep the site free to both job seekers and employers & give us the time to spend on updating the rest of our career content.
Re:rss feed
Yes, thanks for your email, and I’m sorry my first post was aggressive. I checked my RSS aggregator in the morning and was really annoyed that I had 3 pages of job posts to go through, and then the next thing I saw was “These changes should better serve everyone”. It was oil on a fire of a rotten reading experience, but there was no excuse for me to lash out before I heard back from you.
I hope you noticed I’d calmed down by the time I emailed you. I am appreciative of all the work you’ve been doing, and the service is still a service even if it’s not the easy-to-use site it had been before.
I’ll reiterate, though, that if an option ever comes up in the software to — without extra work for you — offer a separate RSS feed for those who’d rather read the old way, I’d greatly appreciate it.
Re:rss feed
See my apology and explanation to Sarah above.
As for why it’s different — well, for one thing, in my aggregator there’s probably an inch of extraneous space taken for header information for each entry in RSS feed. When I get 10 job listings at once in one entry, it takes up far less space than 10 individual job listings. Moreover, I see 10 entries in my aggregator at a time (by my choice, for ease of loading and reading), and, again, I’d rather all the jobs be concatenated into one entry. Also, the entries are easier to read when they’re all concatenated into one. I have geographical limitations, and when there are 10 lines of text, it is easy to scan down the list for the few that are relevant. This quick skimming processes more difficult with the jobs listed separately as they now are. Finally, I’m disabled, and use accessibility software to manipulate my computer, and anything that makes a tool even slightly less useful for easy to manipulate for me is blown out of proportion by the difficulty of using a computer at all.
That being said, I appreciate the work that is put into offering this service for free, and I should not have been so snappy in my original post, for which I apologize.
Re:rss feed
Thanks for the clarification – your concern does make sense in that light, and I’m sorry if we were snappy in our original replies. We do spend a lot of time on this service, and unfortunately seem sometimes to get more complaints than anything else. Hopefully after the initial flurry of ads at the launch of the new format it will calm down and be easier to manage. As an alternative you might try just accessing the job listings page daily or so rather than using the RSS feed, and skimming through there — it’s in reverse-chronological order (and we’re working on figuring out spacing between dates so there should be more white space in there soon). http://www.lisjobs.com/jobs/index.asp