Recommendations on RSS Feeds released

We are pleased to announce that the Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers drawn up by the Recommendations Working Group as part of the JISC funded ticTOCs project have now been released to the public. They can be found at;

http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2009/10/recommendations_on_rss_feeds_f.html

ticTOCs update

The ticTOCs service will shortly be transferring from the development server that has been its home since its beginning to a more robust and stable live server.  It is anticipated that disruption will be minimal. This will also provide us with the ideal opportunity to streamline and improve the database and the maintenance procedures.  The exact date for migration has not been specified yet but we will announce it here when it is confirmed.

New Helpdesk

The new ticTOCs helpdesk has been successfully set up and implemented in conjunction with our colleagues at MIMAS.  All enquiries submitted via the ticTOCs site will be channelled and tracked through the MIMAS helpdesk system.

Brief update on recent ticTOCs activity.

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins titles are in the process of moving to a new platform and their details have been updated accordingly in ticTOCs.

We will monitor the progress and changes to ensure consistency with the details in our database.

New simplified registration procedure

To simplify and speed up the new user registration process, we have removed the need for new users to confirm their registration.  A small number of new users had experienced difficulties confirming their accounts.  We appreciate this can be very frustrating so to minimize any potential delay we will be allowing new users to register and access their account without the need for waiting for a confirmation e-mail.

ticTOCs paper at IATUL Conference

A paper about ticTOCS will be presented at the 30th Annual IATUL Conference, Leuven, Belgium, on Tuesday 2nd June, by Dr Santiago Chumbe, ICBL, Heriot-Watt University. 

The title of the paper is: TicTOCron: an Automatic Solution for Propagating Quality Metadata to Scholarly TOC RSS Feed Metadata. by Santiago Chumbe, and Roddy MacLeod

Abstract:

Institutions and researchers stand to benefit from the facilitation of more widespread syndication of, and easier access to, Table of Content (TOC) RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds produced for scholarly journals. However, many journal TOC RSS feeds are at present being produced with erroneous, poor or incomplete metadata. This can hamper the usefulness of scholarly current awareness services, and also cause problems for individual subscribers to those feeds. This is exactly what the ticTOCron software toolkit aims to overcome. The ticTOCron toolkit automatically enhances poor, heterogeneous and incomplete metadata found in TOC RSS feeds by making use of a pre-defined “Best Practice” metadata scheme suitable for scholarly journals. In this work we depict the main issues and “bad practices” found in TOC RSS metadata obtained from more than 435 scholarly publishers. Then, we describe software solutions implemented via ticTOCron. Some references are made to the algorithms for generating semantic relations within, between and from the harvested TOCs and to the mechanisms for propagating “metadata associations” from a previously crawled metadata-rich reference set. However, an effort is made to avoid technical jargon and to replace complex technical descriptions with samples and simple comparisons. The original metadata is converted to a canonical format using the “Best Practices metadata set” for scholarly papers proposed by the ticTOCs Project. We also present the results produced by ticTOCron when it was used for enhancing and normalizing TOC RSS feeds collected from more than 12,000 journals. Finally we propose a sustainable and scalable computational model whereby the automatic solution is complemented and fine-tuned by a cost-effective human cross-validation process.

Roddy MacLeod
Heriot-Watt University

 

Using ticTOCs feed information to provide TOCs in OPACs

A couple of weeks ago I posted details of the paper by Lisa Rogers ”Transforming Current Awareness through RSS: How two projects (ticTOCs and Gold Dust) are using RSS to improve the information landscape for the 21st century researcher” which she presented at European Library Automation Group Conference (ELAG 09). This paper is now available through E-LIS.

Another paper at ELAG also covered ticTOCs. Peter van Boheemen gave a paper entitled “Using TicToc RSS feed collection”   This paper looks at how it is possible to use a file containing the URLs for the journals listed in ticTOCs in order to provide TOC information within OPACs.

Roddy MacLeod
Heriot-Watt University

Updated FAQ pages

Some general maintenance work on the ticTOCs site has been done, particularly with the FAQ pages.

We have;

Updated:

 Q. Why should I register with ticTOCs?

 Q. Who funds ticTOCs?

 Q. How can I export TOC feeds into another feed reader?

 Q. My institution doesn’t subscribe to RefWorks. How can I turn off the RefWorks links?

 And

 Added:

 Q. Do you provide APIs?

 Q. How does ticTOCs compare to Zetoc?

 Q. How can I access full-text journals off-campus?

Good press for ticTOCs

It’s always nice when the service you’ve been working on is mentioned in the press, and even better when the mention is favourable.

ResourceShelf, a highly respected daily newsletter, recently described ticTOCs as both ‘wonderful’ and ‘awesome’.

ticTOCs is also featured in the latest issue of Information World Review, and also in last week’s Blogspeak from Knowledgespeak. 

It’s also good to see that another library, this time the University Library at Jönköping University,  is integrating ticTOCs data with it’s catalogue. Wageningen Digital Library has previously done similar.

Elsewhere, FeedForward has been using ticTOCS data in jopml.

The News from ticTOCS blog was one of the WordPress Blogs of the Day on 24th April.

When it comes to marketing and promotion, I like balance, though, as I have previously mentioned in this blog.  ticTOCs still lacks a proper alerting capability, although last week I manually sent out a reminder recently to about 2,900 recent registrants.  It’s also not possible to search across all ticTOCs content, though at Heriot-Watt we’re working on this.

Roddy MacLeod
Heriot-Watt University

Links to ELAG 2009 Conference paper and presentation

The presentation slides and conference paper for Lisa Rogers paper ”Transforming Current Awareness through RSS: How two projects (ticTOCs and Gold Dust) are using RSS to improve the information landscape for the 21st century researcher”, European Library Automation Group Conference (ELAG 09), are available.

The slides are also available on slideshare.

Roddy MacLeod
Heriot-Watt University