Legal Research

Little TED: Alerts from the land of pointless

By scott

I, like many of my fellow information/library colleagues, use the EU’s TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) service. For those familiar with TED it is the online version of the ‘Supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union’, dedicated to European public procurement. And yes, it is about as exciting as it sounds.

Now, in common with many sites, you can create saved searches and have these emailed to you or take an RSS feed of the search .

Now if you take the feed you can subscribe to in IE7 or MS Outlook

(actually on a separate note, have you ever tried doing that? According to Outlook ” Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to subscribe to an RSS Feed is quick and easy and does not involve a registration process or fee.” Infact it is so easy that when you click on FILE, TOOLS, or ACTIONS there is no mention of RSS anywhere. That’s because part of this quick and easy process involves you knowing that you have to do the following:

1. On the Tools menu, click Account Settings.
2. On the RSS Feeds tab, click New.
3. In the New RSS Feed dialog box, type or press CTRL+V to paste the URL of the RSS Feed. For example, http://www.example.com/feed/main.xml.
4. Click Add.
5. Click OK.

Yes, it is not a long process, but WHY do I have to go into my account settings to add an RSS feed?)

But I digress. Back with my TED feed. If you try to add it to your iGoogle page, Google Reader, Netvibes or indeed anything non-Microsoft it seems to me, you’re told the link “does not provide a feed” / “sorry, no feeds found at this url” etc

Conclusion: TED RSS feeds = FAIL

And that is the good news because the email update is even worse. For example, today I got an email telling me:

Here are 5 result documents published on TED corresponding to your alert ? published in 053/2010 on 2010-03-17:

Ok, that seems fine (or fine if you ignore fact that today in the 26th and according to the rss feed there is more up-to-date content than stuff from the 17th that the email is alerting me to) until below the five items it then adds ?

The total number of documents matching your criteria is 17. To view all the results please Click here.

What? The whole point of my wanting an email update is so I don’t have to visit the site needlessly. With this update I still need to visit the site if there are more than 5 items matching my profile just to check that the ones they have omitted are not of use to me. What value is that providing exactly? I really do wonder sometimes how people that set these things up ever got jobs. They might as well send me an email each day saying ‘There might be some stuff on our site today that may be of interest to you ? then again, there might not’. In fact I’d suggest that is what TED start doing instead.

Conclusion: TED Email alerts = FAIL

Full post as published by Information Overload on March 26, 2010 (boomark / email).