Thursday 30 April 2009

Aggregating UK Library Job Feeds on Twitter

Been meaning to do this for a while. It seemed like a fairly simple task - in fact I can't believe something doesn't already exist (maybe it does and I just can't find it?). The first job was to gather feeds. I already knew about the jinfo (jobs in information), jobs.ac.uk (academic vacancies) and lgjobs.com feeds. Being sure that there were more (and being unable to find a lisjobnet feed) I put the question to Twitter and got some good tips from @jimmy1712, @ekcragg, @libram, and @joeyanne - including a scraped feed from lisjobnet! (also thanks to @darrenmjones for pointing me towards Feedity, a tool for producing feeds from sites that don't already have them. Haven't tested it yet but looks promising!).

Next stage was to look at aggregating tools and create the Twitter account. @UKLibraryJobs was free so I decided to go for that. As I'm already using Hootsuite I decided to give that a try for aggregating the feeds - if it doesn't work out I look at other tools...

The initial list of feeds is...

lgjobs.gov - libraries category (need to check how comprehensive this one is and possibly find feeds for councils that are not listed?)
Jinfo - Latest Jobs Feed
lisjobnet (unofficial) - in the end I used the feed from @darrenmjones as the other one didn't report a timeline.
TFPL - latest jobs feed
Sue Hill Recruitment - although this looks like it mightbe the jinfo feed with a Sue Hill referral? Will need to look into this...
Jobs.ac.uk - Information Management category - actually I couldn't add this one as it doesn't have a timeline either - I'll look at using Feedity to scrape this.

...I'm hoping that if anyone knows of any others they'll let me know or maybe we can open access to the Hootsuite profile to let others add feeds without having to go through me.

So, that'll do for now. Jobs to do are:
1) Tart up the Twitter account a bit.
2) Check that the feeds are working.
3) Look into the scope of the lgjobs and Sue Hill feeds.
4) Scrape a feed from jobs.ac.uk
5) The most Hootsuite will post is 5 posts an hour from each feed so need to check if this is a problem.

Sure there's other things but that's enough for now.

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