The ticTOCs Project: Transforming current awareness

UKSG Breakout SessionThe ticTOCs Project:

Transforming current awareness8th and 9th April 2008,

Riviera International Conference Centre, Torquay

ticTOCs men

Roddy MacLeod, Heriot-Watt UniversityTerry Bucknell, University of Liverpool

http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/ticTOCs website

Breakout Session

• Potential of RSS feeds for journal tables of contents (TOCs)

• The ticTOCs Project• Demonstration of ticTOCs pilot• Standards

– Why they are important in this context– Progress of the ticTOCs Project towards recommendations for

best practice and standardisation of journal TOCs– What publishers can do

• Development ideas– A look at some possible ticTOCs service enhancements

Scholarly Journal Current Awareness

TOCs, Current Contents, etc

Current Contents

Current Contents Connect®

TOCs by email

TOCs by email

• “Some users reported that the alerts they themselves had set up ‘haunted them’. I have exactly the same feeling, as sometimes it feels like the alerts I have set for myself are self-inflicted spam”

• Jonas Holmstrom: Report on 8th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2004)

TOCs by RSS

• March 2005 - 13 Publishers with 1,139 titles

• October 2006 - 38 Publishers with more than 7,000 titles

• April 2008 – many more publishers, 000s more titles!

TOCs by RSSAmerican Chemical SocietyAmerican Institute of PhysicsAmerican Physical SocietyAnnual Reviews ANSI Journals BioMed Central Blackwell Synergy BMJ JournalsCALIBER - University of California PressCambridge Journals OnlineCell PressInternational Union of CrystallographyEDP SciencesEmeraldHaworth PressHighWire Press Hindawi Publishing CoporationIEEE XploreInderscienceIngenta Connect Institute of PhysicsKarger Publishers

Lippincott Williams & WilkinsMary Ann Liebert, Inc.MIT Press Nature Publishing GroupNew England Journal of MedicineNew ScientistNew StatesmanOxford University Press Peeters Publishers PLoS - Public Library of Science journals Project MUSERoyal Society of ChemistrySAGE Publications ScienceScienceDirect SIAM Springer Taylor & Francis informaworld Thieme – Wiley InterScience Zetoc…

TOCs by RSS

• TOC RSS feeds potentially make things easier for the end-user

• Read them when they want, in a place of their choosing• Easy to change or cancel subscriptions • Re-use possibilities, etc

Exploitation of current content

• Publisher revenues $5 billion p/a STM journals.• UK higher education journal subs = £94.5 million.• 20,000 – 25,000 Peer Reviewed journals.• 200,000 researchers UK, 5.5 million globally.

• Efficient exploitation of latest issues is vital for publishers, researchers and authors.

ticTOCs www.tictocs.ac.uk

Project to develop a freely available current awareness service which will make it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse journal tables of contents (TOCs) from multiple publishers in a personalisable website, and also facilitate the export of TOC RSS feeds to feedreaders of choice.

Not-for-profitUniversities, etc For profit publishers, etc

ticTOCs partners

Personalisable Web environment

SelectStore

AggregateExport

Display

Export items to bibliographic management services

Re-usemetadata

ticTOCs

Directory ofPublishers’TOC RSS

Feeds

Community Networking possibilities

Content

Full text

• You definitely won’t have to be an RSS geek to use ticTOCs.

• If you are one, however, there’s more still.

More information

• Research Information, Issue 33, December 2007/January 2008

• Free Pint, No 234 • Multimedia

Information & Technology, Vol 34 no 1, Feb 2008.

• News from ticTOCs blog

ticTOCs beta Demonstration

• http://www.tictocs.ac.uk• Is definitely ‘Beta’• # of feeds (April 4th) 6446• Search by word(s) in title• Search by publisher• Display a TOC – full text links – RSS icon• You don’t have to register, but if you do –

retained MyTOCs• Export feeds as OPML feature

Standards

• Why they are important in this context• Progress of the ticTOCs Project towards

recommendations for best practice and standardisation of journal TOCs

• What publishers can do

Standards – Why They Matter

• Different structure / content means:– Different processing in our back-end

• More difficult to build & maintain– Different appearance in our front-end

• Blank spaces instead of content• ‘Inappropriate’ content• Inconsistent user experience

Standards – Example Issues 1

• RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or Atom• Latest issue, several issues, articles in

press?• Feeds that require registration/login first• Dynamically generated feeds (slow)• Invalid feeds – fail RSS validator tests• HTML mark-up in feeds• Empty elements

Standards – Example Issues 2

• What should a feed’s <title> contain? e.g.

• <title>Nature</title>• <title>BMJ Current Issue</title>• <title>British Journal of Visual Impairment current issue</title>• <title>Journal of Geophysics and Engineering latest papers</title>• <title>British Journal of Criminology – current issue</title>• <title>Journal of managerial psychology: table of contents</title>• <title>Science Direct Publication: Biochemical and Biophysical

research communications</title>• <title>SpringerLink - Journal</title> !!!• <title>Blackwell Synergy: International Journal of Cosmetic Science:

Table of Contents</title>

Standards – Example Issues 3

• How to encode author names– separate authors in separate <dc:creator> fields– all authors together in one <dc:creator> field– all authors together in <description> field (!)

• How to structure author names– <dc:creator>Andrew Hede <\dc:creator>– <dc:creator>Hede, A<\dc:creator>– <dc:creator>Chen, Xioa-bo <\dc:creator>– <dc:creator>Smith, A. , Frank, L.<\dc:creator>

• Similarly for publication dates…

Towards RSS TOC Standards

• Recommendations Sub-Group, including:– Geoffrey Bilder (CrossRef)– Leigh Dodds (Ingenta)– Tony Hammond (NPG)– Richard O’Beirne (OUP)

• Meeting soon to draft recommendations• Seek endorsement from CrossRef Technical Working

Group• Will become CrossRef/ticTOCs recommendations• ticTOCs and CrossRef will publicise them to publishers• Publishers, please implement them!

Towards Sustainability

• So far obtained/created OPML files through contacting publishers, screen-scraping etc.

• Need automated way to maintain RSS feed metadata

• Soon publishers will be able to submit details of their RSS feeds to CrossRef

• ticTOCs will draw on data from CrossRef• So could other feed readers

Development Ideas

• Look at a few things currently under planning/development

• Discussion welcome

Idea 1 : Subject browsing for TOCs

• Obtaining Ulrichs subject classifications and DDC from ProQuest

• Users will be able to navigate a subject tree on ticTOCs site to select journals

• Gateways, libraries etc. will be able to query by DDC to obtain OPML file of feeds for re-use in their subject-based sites/pages

Idea 2 : Search within all items

• ticTOCs includes more than 6,000 of the most recent journal TOCs, from more than 30 publishers (with more to come) and these TOCs contain details of over 100,000 scholarly articles.

• How useful would it be to be able to search, by keyword(s), within this ‘moving target database’ (i.e. only items from the most recent TOCs will be included from each journal) of current content?

Idea 2 : Search within all items cont’d

Idea 3 : Export to bibliographic management software

• Content on ticTOCs is by its very nature ephemeral

• Need facilities for users to keep permanent record of useful articles

• Facilities to all users to export / tag articles to RefWorks / Connotea / del.icio.us etc.

• Records/tags will refer to article at publishers’ sites, not on ticTOCs

Idea 4 : Alerts

• Alerts – How useful would it be if someone, who had registered with ticTOCs and had stored some TOCs in MyTOCs, could then request that they be alerted by email, on a frequency of their choice, about the new TOCs from those in their MyTOCs?

• e.g. a user identifies some feeds of interest as MyTOCs, and we subsequently email them details of those TOCs for which new content is available, on a frequency of their choice.

Idea 4 : Alerts cont’d

• Here is your monthly update from ticTOCs. The following journal Tables of Content have new items:Journal of Management (6 items)Management and Organisation (8 items)Management in Education (12 items)Click here to access these TOCs.

Idea 5 : Filtering

• Many TOCs are very long and researchers are very busy

• Set up filters on feeds (by article title, author etc.) so that only relevant articles appear in feeds

• Single filter across all chosen feeds, or apply filter to a single feeds

Idea 6 : Embedding feeds

• How useful would it be if ticTOCs included Code for easy embedding of a TOC RSS feed elsewhere?

• …

Idea 6 : Embedding feeds cont’d

Idea 6 : Embedding feeds cont’d

Thankyou!

• See News from ticTOCs http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/ for results from this discussion