TOCRoSS
Emerald Group Publishing, Talis, and University of Derby placed journal tables of contents data into a library catalogue without human intervention.
Full Project Title
Table of Contents by Really Simple Syndication
Summary
Though much of an academic library’s budget is spent on acquiring serials, most Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) contain only records for the journal titles, not the articles they contain. Emerald Group Publishing reasoned that if it were possible to add data about journal articles to the library OPAC, this could improve their visibility and discoverability, and deliver a more integrated OPAC experience to library users.
Emerald collaborated with Talis and University of Derby on this project to see if RSS could be used to place journal table of contents (TOC) data into a library OPAC without human intervention. RSS is a standard for transmitting news feeds, and many publishers use it for TOC alerting services aimed at end users. Using RSS to transmit feeds to a library OPAC was therefore an innovative use of the standard.
They extended the RSS 2.0 specification to carry metadata about journal articles in ONIX for Serials SRN (Serials Release Notification) format. The diagram below shows how the feeds were delivered. RSS feeds from the publisher’s site were sent to a listener server at the customer site that monitored the feeds. Talis developed the software for handling the TOCRoSS feeds and generating MARC records for each article. During the project, TOC data for 160 Emerald journals (3,000 articles) was imported into the OPAC at University of Derby. Users were able to search using keywords, retrieve journal article records, and view the full text, and overall feedback was positive about including article records in the OPAC.
Outcomes
Emerald has developed a ‘Publisher Starter Kit’ with associated software to assist other content providers develop services based on TOCRoSS feeds. TOCRoSS was conceived as a standards-based technology for enabling Web 2.0 applications and successfully demonstrated this by importing TOC data into a library OPAC. There is potential to use it for other applications, e.g. e-reconciliation of library subscriptions, or an alerting service from a single service provider using metadata from many publishers.
Outputs
The project deliverables will allow other publishers to create RSS feeds to the TOCRoSS standard and develop content services based on the feeds. They are released under a GPL license and are available from the TOCRoSS page at SourceForge.
Publisher Starter Kit and User Guide
The Starter Kit explains how to set up an RSS server and create RSS feeds to the TOCRoSS standard. All the software is included. The kit contains:
- TOCRoSS publisher specification & design document
- TOCRoSS publisher starter guide
- TOCRoSS publisher commandline application (TocrossRSS.jar)
- TOCRoSS batch file (TocrossRSSFeeds.bat)
- A build file (build.xml)
- A drivers file (drivers.xml)
- A database queries file (RSS_DatabaseQuery.xml)
- The sourcenames text file (sources.txt)
- The feednames text file (feednames.txt)
- A single XSLT transformation file (RSS_OnixSRD.xslt)
RSS Listener Server
The source code for, and a deployment wrap of, the server is available for download from SourceForge. Shipped, under the same GPL license are two example processor modules. One produces a simple text file containing a list of the Journal articles received. The second produces a file of Marc records in XML format suitable for importing in to a Library or other system that can import Marc records in XML form. The download also contains the Unix/Linux scripts that will start the server and a sample configuration file. The sample configuration includes the addresses of some test feeds provided Emerald. The URLs for these test feeds are:
Reports
The project’s Final Report (PDF) to JISC explains the project work in detail. It includes the very interesting results of the audit done at the start of the project and the impact study done at the end.
Publications
- Paul Evans, Transforming the Cataloguing of Journals through TOCRoSS, ALISS Quarterly, October 2006, 2(1), 43-46.
Presentations
- Paul Evans, TOCRoSS: Putting Tables of Contents into Library Catalogues, presentation at Discovery and Access: Standards and the Information Chain, London, 7 December 2006: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/pals-2006/
Further Information