Table of Contents by Really Simple Syndication
The three partners involved in the project were Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Talis Information Limited and University of Derby.
Executive Summary
The aims and objectives of the TOCRoSS project were to:
- Extend the RSS 2.0 standard to encompass relevant components of standards such as
ONIX, Prism, etc. and publish the resultant document in the public domain
- Use the extended RSS standard to provide a greater level of automation of interoperability
between the publisher and a library through the Integrated Library System (ILS)
- Deliver open source software components and XML schemas, which will be freely available
for the whole of the FE/HE library, publisher and ILS supplier communities
- Produce a demonstration implementation of a service utilising the standards and software as
part of the project
- Report on the impact of this project for an academic institution.
One of the problems we believed TOCRoSS would enable to be solved was the fact that metadata about the articles contained in a library’s journal subscriptions is not available in the library’s catalogue. This data has not been generally available before because it would require too much resource to manually catalogue this information. Automating the import of this data into the OPAC would mean that the visibility and discoverability for library patrons of this content the university acquires would be increased.
In order to achieve our objectives, we worked with the NISO/EDItEUR joint working party for the Serials Release Notification standard to extend this to the article level. We used this work to extend RSS 2.0 to deliver highly flexible and detailed information about journal tables of contents. We then developed a RSS feed listener server which passed the information to a processor for the ILS that then produced MARC records for each article. These MARC records were imported into the library OPAC. Users were able to search the OPAC and discover records about articles related to their search terms, in addition to the usual records for books and other materials. TOCRoSS was used to implement an automated OPAC update service at the University of Derby for approximately 160 journals and consisted of records for approximately 3,000 articles. Users from the key stakeholder groups tested the service and feedback was on the whole positive about the inclusion of article records in the library OPAC. Concerns were raised about the management of the
data once it had been imported into the OPAC (quantity of data, impact on system performance, changes in ownership of journals between publishers, etc.) but these concerns were mainly outside the scope of the TOCRoSS project. TOCRoSS itself was able to demonstrate that the import of TOC data into a library OPAC could be automated and that it can successfully enable Web 2.0 (or Library 2.0) applications.
A starter kit for publishers who wish to produce TOCRoSS standard feeds, code for the RSS feed listener server, examples of processors and sample TOCRoSS feeds have been released under the GPL license and made available at the Project website on SourceForge.