A lament about moving targets - New Release RSS feed

Digital information is fantastic.  It makes research tasks more flexible when you have options for the format or forum that information is available from .  One thing that hinders me, and others I am sure, is the potential for born digital information to move, merge, be edited, or disappear.

There have been laments and warnings about link rot (Link Rot in Court Decisions – Still a Problem, Fifth Annual Link Rot Report of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, Citation by Shortened URL) and concerns about access to solely digital legislative and government information (Canadian Association of Law Libraries: Could Federal Budget Affect Access to Legislative Information?,  Hide and Seek – a New Paradigm for Finding Official Documents?, Government of Canada Moves to E-Printing) circulated and shared.  One major issue that hasn't been specifically addressed is the pain involved with service access point changes.

I totally understand why websites and web services have to change and evolve.  Still, it gets me a little riled up when important access points are subject to moving around and disruption with no warning, notice, or reason.  Yes, I am complaining about the Alberta Government News Releases.

Government new releases are an important source of legal information.  They are generated when there are new Orders in Council, they contain information about government consultations and legislative change and the background of why decisions are made and implemented.

In mid-August, my team was worried that our RSS readers were not working properly. Alberta Government news releases were not appearing.  Because this information is critical to current awareness services that my team provides, we investigated further and found that the news pages for the alberta.ca website had changed significantly.  There was no link shown to RSS feeds.

There is still no RSS feeds list easily identifiable from the site, but responsive public servants shared this news:

Our RSS feeds have been updated.  Please see the links below.

Listing of all updated feeds:  http://alberta.ca/Newsrssfeeds.cfm

Or here is the feed to see all news announcements: http://alberta.ca/newsroom/newsroom.cfm