The ticTOCs Project: Transforming current awareness

UKSG Breakout Session The ticTOCs Project: Transforming current awareness 8 th and 9 th April 2008, Riviera International Conference Centre, Torquay

ticTOCs men
Roddy MacLeod, Heriot-Watt University
Terry Bucknell, University of Liverpool
http:// www.tictocs.ac.uk /
ticTOCs website

Breakout Session
Potential of RSS feeds for journal tables of contents (TOCs)
The ticTOCs Project
Demonstration of ticTOCs pilot
Standards
Why they are important in this context
Progress of the ticTOCs Project towards recommendations for best practice and standardisation of journal TOCs
What publishers can do
Development ideas
A look at some possible ticTOCs service enhancements

Scholarly Journal Current Awareness

TOCs, Current Contents, etc

Current Contents Current Contents Connect®

TOCs by email

TOCs by email
“ Some users reported that the alerts they themselves had set up ‘haunted them’. I have exactly the same feeling, as sometimes it feels like the alerts I have set for myself are self-inflicted spam”
Jonas Holmstrom: Report on 8th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2004)

TOCs by RSS
March 2005 - 13 Publishers with 1,139 titles
October 2006 - 38 Publishers with more than 7,000 titles
April 2008 – many more publishers, 000s more titles!

TOCs by RSS
American Chemical Society
American Institute of Physics
American Physical Society
Annual Reviews
ANSI Journals
BioMed Central
Blackwell Synergy
BMJ Journals
CALIBER - University of California Press
Cambridge Journals Online
Cell Press
International Union of Crystallography
EDP Sciences
Emerald
Haworth Press
HighWire Press
Hindawi Publishing Coporation
IEEE Xplore
Inderscience
Ingenta Connect
Institute of Physics
Karger Publishers
Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
MIT Press
Nature Publishing Group
New England Journal of Medicine
New Scientist
New Statesman
Oxford University Press
Peeters Publishers
PLoS - Public Library of Science journals
Project MUSE
Royal Society of Chemistry
SAGE Publications
Science
ScienceDirect
SIAM
Springer
Taylor & Francis informaworld
Thieme –
Wiley InterScience
Zetoc
…

TOCs by RSS
TOC RSS feeds potentially make things easier for the end-user
Read them when they want, in a place of their choosing
Easy to change or cancel subscriptions
Re-use possibilities, etc

Exploitation of current content
Publisher revenues $5 billion p/a STM journals.
UK higher education journal subs = £94.5 million.
20,000 – 25,000 Peer Reviewed journals.
200,000 researchers UK, 5.5 million globally.
Efficient exploitation of latest issues is vital for publishers, researchers and authors.

ticTOCs www.tictocs.ac.uk
Project to develop a freely available current awareness service which will make it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse journal tables of contents (TOCs) from multiple publishers in a personalisable website, and also facilitate the export of TOC RSS feeds to feedreaders of choice.

ticTOCs partners Not-for-profit Universities, etc For profit publishers, etc

Personalisable Web environment Select Store Aggregate Export Display Export items to bibliographic management services Re-use metadata ticTOCs Directory of Publishers’ TOC RSS Feeds Community Networking possibilities Content Full text

You definitely won’t have to be an RSS geek to use ticTOCs.
If you are one, however, there’s more still.

More information
Research Information , Issue 33, December 2007/January 2008
Free Pint , No 234
Multimedia Information & Technology , Vol 34 no 1, Feb 2008.
News from ticTOCs blog

ticTOCs beta Demonstration
http://www.tictocs.ac.uk
Is definitely ‘Beta’
# of feeds (April 4 th ) 6446
Search by word(s) in title
Search by publisher
Display a TOC – full text links – RSS icon
You don’t have to register, but if you do – retained MyTOCs
Export feeds as OPML feature

Standards
Why they are important in this context
Progress of the ticTOCs Project towards recommendations for best practice and standardisation of journal TOCs
What publishers can do

Standards – Why They Matter
Different structure / content means:
Different processing in our back-end
More difficult to build & maintain
Different appearance in our front-end
Blank spaces instead of content
‘Inappropriate’ content
Inconsistent user experience

Standards – Example Issues 1
RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or Atom
Latest issue, several issues, articles in press?
Feeds that require registration/login first
Dynamically generated feeds (slow)
Invalid feeds – fail RSS validator tests
HTML mark-up in feeds
Empty elements

What should a feed’s <title> contain? e.g.
<title>Nature</title>
<title>BMJ Current Issue</title>
<title>British Journal of Visual Impairment current issue</title>
<title>Journal of Geophysics and Engineering latest papers</title>
<title>British Journal of Criminology – current issue</title>
<title>Journal of managerial psychology: table of contents</title>
<title>Science Direct Publication: Biochemical and Biophysical research communications</title>
<title>SpringerLink - Journal</title> !!!
<title>Blackwell Synergy: International Journal of Cosmetic Science: Table of Contents</title>

How to encode author names
separate authors in separate <dc:creator> fields
all authors together in one <dc:creator> field
all authors together in <description> field (!)
How to structure author names
<dc:creator>Andrew Hede <dc:creator>
<dc:creator>Hede, A<dc:creator>
<dc:creator>Chen, Xioa-bo <dc:creator>
<dc:creator>Smith, A. , Frank, L.<dc:creator>
Similarly for publication dates…

Towards RSS TOC Standards
Recommendations Sub-Group, including:
Geoffrey Bilder (CrossRef)
Leigh Dodds (Ingenta)
Tony Hammond (NPG)
Richard O’Beirne (OUP)
Meeting soon to draft recommendations
Seek endorsement from CrossRef Technical Working Group
Will become CrossRef/ticTOCs recommendations
ticTOCs and CrossRef will publicise them to publishers
Publishers, please implement them!

Towards Sustainability
So far obtained/created OPML files through contacting publishers, screen-scraping etc.
Need automated way to maintain RSS feed metadata
Soon publishers will be able to submit details of their RSS feeds to CrossRef
ticTOCs will draw on data from CrossRef
So could other feed readers

Development Ideas
Look at a few things currently under planning/development
Discussion welcome

Idea 1 : Subject browsing for TOCs
Obtaining Ulrichs subject classifications and DDC from ProQuest
Users will be able to navigate a subject tree on ticTOCs site to select journals
Gateways, libraries etc. will be able to query by DDC to obtain OPML file of feeds for re-use in their subject-based sites/pages

Idea 2 : Search within all items
ticTOCs includes more than 6,000 of the most recent journal TOCs, from more than 30 publishers (with more to come) and these TOCs contain details of over 100,000 scholarly articles.
How useful would it be to be able to search, by keyword(s), within this ‘moving target database’ (i.e. only items from the most recent TOCs will be included from each journal) of current content?

Idea 2 : Search within all items cont’d

Idea 3 : Export to bibliographic management software
Content on ticTOCs is by its very nature ephemeral
Need facilities for users to keep permanent record of useful articles
Facilities to all users to export / tag articles to RefWorks / Connotea / del.icio.us etc.
Records/tags will refer to article at publishers’ sites, not on ticTOCs

Idea 4 : Alerts
Alerts – How useful would it be if someone, who had registered with ticTOCs and had stored some TOCs in MyTOCs, could then request that they be alerted by email, on a frequency of their choice , about the new TOCs from those in their MyTOCs?
e.g. a user identifies some feeds of interest as MyTOCs, and we subsequently email them details of those TOCs for which new content is available, on a frequency of their choice .

Idea 4 : Alerts cont’d
Here is your monthly update from ticTOCs. The following journal Tables of Content have new items:
Journal of Management (6 items)
Management and Organisation (8 items)
Management in Education (12 items)
Click here to access these TOCs.

Idea 5 : Filtering
Many TOCs are very long and researchers are very busy
Set up filters on feeds (by article title, author etc.) so that only relevant articles appear in feeds
Single filter across all chosen feeds, or apply filter to a single feeds

Idea 6 : Embedding feeds
How useful would it be if ticTOCs included Code for easy embedding of a TOC RSS feed elsewhere?
…

Idea 6 : Embedding feeds cont’d

Thankyou!
See News from ticTOCs http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/ for results from this discussion

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The ticTOCs Project: Transforming current awareness

by Roddy MacLeod on Apr 10, 2008

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