On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 08:27:01AM -0500, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> Screen scraping is for the birds!! If we, libraries, are so much about
> standards, then why do we tolerate interfaces to indexes that force us
> to do screen scraping. As soon as they change their interface you have
> all sorts of new work to do. "Just give me the data."

Agreed. The trouble is if you *need* the data, and the publisher isn't willing
to make it available in XML or whatever then you have no choice but to
scrape.

Can you believe that a nice online publication like D-lib Magazine does
not offer RSS table of contents, or an OAI interface, or any type of
data feed? I wrote to them and asked about it, and never got a response.

//Ed