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

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

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

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

A paper about ticTOCS will be presented at the ELAG 2009 Conference, Bratislava, on Wednesday 22nd April, by Lisa Rogers, ICBL, Heriot-Watt University.

The title of the paper is: 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, by Lisa Rogers, Simon Hodson and Roddy MacLeod

Abstract:

This paper looks at the current situation with respect to RSS and then reports upon the findings of the ticTOCs and Gold Dust projects.  We will look at the lessons learnt from developing the ticTOCs service, and also report on two iterations of the Gold Dust development and use cycles.  We will deliver an appraisal of the effectiveness of the raft of techniques being employed by Gold Dust.  How effective are current data mining and pattern matching techniques for such an application?  How useful is RSS metadata in this context? These findings will be of considerable pertinence both for future services which may use RSS Feeds, and for future research and development in the area of adaptive personalisation using RSS.

The ELAG (European Library Automation Group) Conference is Europe’s premier conference for library and information management technology.  A full programme is available.

Roddy MacLeod
Heriot-Watt University

Some pretty interesting statistics, taken from ticTOCs the journal tables of contents (TOCs) service, are available below. 

There are two lists.  The first one shows the ‘top 100 journals’ according to popularity of titles added by users of the ticTOCs service to their MyTOCs (explanation – those who have registered with ticTOCs (which is free) can save selected TOCs to a MyTOCs section so that the next time they visit they can see new TOC content, and thereby keep up-to-date with the literature on a regular basis).  Over 3,000 people have registered with ticTOCs since it was launched in December 2008, and so the list below is a snapshot of the most popular journal titles selected by those registrants. The figures show how many people have saved each journal title to their MyTOCs.

What is immediately obvious from looking at the first list is the fact that ticTOCs is being widely used by library and information professionals, but not yet by researchers in other disciplines.  Librarians seem to understand ticTOCs very quickly, and to get the message of how useful the service is if you want to keep up-to-date with scholarly literature.  But, I wonder, when are researchers in other disciplines going to catch on? 

ticTOCs has had a wonderful reception from the LIS community.  Now, we hope hope that the word will spread to the rest of the scholarly community. 

The second list, below, shows the top 100 most viewed journals by those who have registered with ticTOCs.

Roddy MacLeod
Heriot-Watt University Library

In the April issue of the Péter’s Digital Reference Shelf section of Reference Reviews, Péter Jacso has written a detailed review of the ticTOCs service.  This is an in-depth review, which I invite you to read.  It looks at both the good points of the ticTOCS service, and some limitations.

The following is an extract:

“ticTOCS is a splendid, state of the art version of the traditional current awareness services from RSS feeds of the Table of Contents pages of more than 14,400 scholarly journals. It takes the pain out of learning about the content of the most recent and even upcoming issues of journals. It has some lacuna in journal coverage in spite of its wide scope, and a few software shortcomings. Even in its infancy, this service helps greatly in centralizing, personalizing and filtering the flood of information. It saves a lot of time, and offers a lot of gratification to researchers free.”

Roddy MacLeod

Some people have asked what are the differences between ticTOCs and Zetoc RSS?  I’ll try to explain, but this may involve a fair amount of detail.

Before describing some of the similarities and differences betwen ticTOCs and Zetoc RSS, I should explain that those who are involved in maintaining Zetoc have also played a role in the ticTOCs project, and the Heriot-Watt contingent of the ticTOCs project is continuing to work with Zetoc and the Discovery to Delivery at Edina and Mimas (D2D@E&M) project to share information and data.

1. Background

ticTOCs was developed by a consortium consisting of the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.   The project was funded by JISC through the U&I Programme.

Zetoc RSS is one part of the Zetoc service.  Zetoc provides access to the British Library’s Electronic Table of Contents of journals and around 16,000 conference proceedings published per year. The Zetoc database covers 1993 to date, and is updated on a daily basis. It includes an email alerting service, with relevant new articles and papers.  The BL provides Mimas with the data for the Zetoc service, to which Mimas add Biomed Central (open access) content.  For more details about the background to Zetoc, see the About Zetoc page.

2. Availability

ticTOCs is freely available to anyone, anywhere.

Zetoc RSS is free to use for members of JISC-sponsored UK higher and further education institutions and research councils. It is also available to all of NHS England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. A number of other institutions are eligible to subscribe to Zetoc.

3. Numbers

There are 27,209 journals in Zetoc RSS and 12,387 journals in ticTOCs. Many journals are in both, roughly 2,300 are in ticTOCs only, and 17,400 in Zetoc only.

4. Contents

ticTOCs contains the latest TOCs for ejournals where publishers have made RSS feeds of TOCs available.

Zetoc RSS contains TOCs that have been rekeyed from around 17,000 print journals.

5. Searching

You can search ticTOCs for journals by title, publisher or subject and then view them in the ticTOCs site.  As yet, you cannot search across the contents of ticTOCs.

You can search Zetoc RSS for journals by journal name or by words or phrases in journal titles.  You can also browse Zetoc RSS for journals by subject category.  Zetoc Search includes content back to 1993 which can be searched, and you can request email alerts based on keyword/phrase and/or author via Zetoc Alert.

6. Abstracts

About half of the TOCs in ticTOCs contain abstracts.

No TOCs in Zetoc RSS contain abstracts apart from the Biomed Central content.

7. Current awareness

ticTOCs can be used as a standalone current awareness service by registering (free), then saving selected journal titles to ‘MyTOCs’, and when you revisit the site new content (i.e. new TOCs) will be indicated in your MyTOCs in bold. Over 2,800 people have so far registered to use ticTOCs in this way. Unfortunately, alerts are not yet in place, so you need to remember to return to the ticTOCs website!

You can use ticTOCs to get the RSS feed for single journal TOCs (search for TOCs, display a TOC and click on Export feed to…), or collected TOCs (add some TOCs to MyTOCs and then Export selected) for use in other feedreaders.

Zetoc RSS enables you to subscribe to feeds for individual journals through feedreaders.

9. Feed origins

The RSS feeds from ticTOCs that you can export to other feedreaders are the feeds as provided by publishers.  Publishers sometimes structure their TOC RSS feeds in different ways.

The RSS feeds from Zetoc RSS that you can export to other feedreaders are feeds from Zetoc and are identically structured.

10. Display

When you view a TOC in ticTOCs, the display has been ‘normalised’ to make it appear in a more standard way.  If you export a feed from ticTOCs and use it in another feedreader, because the feed will then come directly from the publisher, it will not be normalised and the display may not be consistent with feeds for TOCs from other publishers.  If the publisher changes that feed, it may even disappear.

All Zetoc RSS feeds are displayed in the same way.

12. Bibliographic management

When viewing TOCs in ticTOCs, you can export citations to RefWorks (if you have a RefWorks account), by clicking on the RefWorks icon.

Zetoc Search supports export.  You can save your hit list, or tag select records from your hit list as a text file by using the ‘download’ button at the top of the screen. You can usually import this text file into a local database, such as EndNote or Reference Manager, but you will need to have the correct import filter for this.  Some software includes a filter for Zetoc, and some filters are available to download from the Z39.50 access pages on Zetoc. Some bibliographic software allows you to make a connection to Zetoc and directly import your results. See the Z39.50 access pages for further information.

You will be able to access articles via ticTOCs if they are Open Access, or if you are entitled to IP authenticated access to that content or if you have appropriate passwords.  ticTOCs doesn’t support OpenURL resolver software.  Access for an institution’s off-campus users can be achieved if that institution has EZproxy or WAM.  ticTOCs does not yet offer OpenURL links but for feeds that include DOIs in their TOCs you could either configure a LibX toolbar for your institution that will turn DOIs into OpenURLs, or you may be able to redirect DOIs to your link resolver using a cookie (SFX can do this).

Zetoc RSS feeds include OpenURL-based ‘COinS’, which can be sent to any resolver software specified by the user.  Zetoc Search supports OpenURL resolver software, enabling users to link from the Zetoc full record to the range of services defined by their institution.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

Please be advised that all problems with the ticTOCs service due to hardware problems at Mimas have now been resolved.

We do apologise for the interruption to the service and for the inconvenience experienced by our users at the time. Thank you for your patience.

Roddy MacLeod

Mimas have apologised for service interruption to all Mimas services with the exception of ESDS, Census, Intute, UKPMC. This has been caused by a recurrence of the disc problems they encountered on Monday. The current status is that the recovery will take quite some time and services are expected to be unavailable for the rest of today.

Roddy MacLeod