Journal table of contents service
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This project created a fully functioning suite of facilities dedicated to journal current awareness, based upon RSS feeds and Web 2.0 technologies. This ‘TOCosphere’ enables the smart aggregation, recombination, synthesization, output and reuse of standardised journal TOC RSS feeds and their content.
Executive Summary
'ticTOCs is impressive…this is terrific'
Internet News The project aims have been achieved through an iterative, cyclical process of: develop, test, debug/change and responding to users’ needs.
Through developing the ticTOCs service, populating the service’s database of feeds, working in partnership with publishers and testing with users we identified that there is a need for TOC feeds to have a standardised structure and content.
To meet this need we created a Recommendations Working Group (RWG) to draft a set of recommendations for publishers to implement which will not only benefit the publishers but more importantly, the end user.
The service developed by the project has been very well received. User testing and feedback via the service website and numerous mentions on blogs and in the media have indicated that there is much support for the idea of a site dedicated to the discovery and retrieval of Journal TOC feeds. 'In a word, wow!' ResourceShelf
To be successful in the longer term, the service developed by the project needs to increase the number of journal TOC RSS feeds in its directory, develop and promote APIs so that journal TOC feeds can be automatically incorporated into existing tools (e.g. A-Z e-journal listing products from commercial vendors), and attract funding to cover the costs of development and maintenance.
The current ticTOCs site received over 20,000 visits and 120,000 hits in the first 6 weeks and over 2,000 users registered with the service during this period.
In the absence, currently, of any standardised structure in the TOC RSS feeds, a ‘normalisation’ mechanism has been developed by the ticTOCs technical team to ensure consistent display of TOC content regardless of the publisher’s format. The database is updated daily to ensure the most up to date feed is available to ticTOCs users, making ticTOCs one of the most up to date current awareness services available.
We are developing a number of ticTOCs Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to allow other developers, librarians and other information specialists the possibility to access and reuse any of the content available from ticTOCs.