Every university library should have one of these, but so far, only one does

A major disappointment of my working career was that relatively little resulted from my various plans and efforts to develop freely available current awareness services and facilities for scholarly researchers and students everywhere.

In 2007, we (a consortium of universities and publishers) were funded to the tune of £200k by JISC to develop a journal Tables of Contents service called ticTOCs, and a further £200k (through a different consortium and management) to research into aggregating RSS content from numerous sources and develop Personal Interest Profiles from existing data (the Gold Dust project).

However, although a workable and fairly useful ticTOCs service was eventually developed, and the Gold Dust project delivered some extremely interesting results, neither of these projects delivered anything like their full potential.  Very unfortunately, the ticTOCs partners became embroiled in disagreements* about the purpose of the project, and as a result many of the original project objectives were left undone or half-baked.  The disagreements and delays within ticTOCs also had a negative effect on the Gold Dust project.  This was a great pity, as there was, and still is, immense potential for what can be done with the vast amount of existing and freely available quality journal table of contents RSS metadata currently produced by hundreds of commercial, non-commercial and Open Access publishers.  Since both projects completed their work in 2009, even more possibilities for utilising this metadata in various ways within social networks and suchlike have presented themselves.  Some major tricks have been missed.

At the heart of the matter are numerous things that can be done with aggregated RSS feeds, of various kinds but especially RSS feeds for scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs), in order to enable researchers, students and others to keep up-to-date, with minimum effort on their part, with the results and outputs of scholarly research and other relevant information.

Fortunately, as a result of the separate JournalTOCs project, not everything has been lost.  JournalTOCs is a freely available service which is still going forwards in terms of developing freely available journal current awareness services of various kinds and hues which are aimed at not only researchers and students, but also library services.

JournalTOCs interface

For a start, the JournalTOCs service is now the largest, free and searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs) in the world and is regularly updated. It contains TOCs for over 14,000 journals collected from over 550 publishers. It is a really useful current awareness service which allows you to find, view, save, manage and revisit the latest scholarly journal Tables of Contents within an easy to use interface.  You don’t need to know anything at all about RSS in order to make the most of it, which is important as many academics don’t have the time or inclination to get to grips with RSS, but if you do know a bit about RSS, you can also use JournalTOCs to export feeds in OPML format.  In addition, you can search within nearly 400,000 TOCs, and set up a profile which stores your selection of journal TOCs so that you can revisit the site at any time and view the latest TOCs for your journals.  Over 3,000 people have already registered.

There is also a JournalTOCs API which gives libraries access to the entire database of articles, journals and publishers, which is being updated and continuously collected from the publishers’ own TOC RSS feeds, as soon as they are published on the web.  This API can be used in various ways – for example to embed journal Tables of Contents within library catalogues.

And there’s a TechJournalsContents service which lets you search within journal TOCs for technology-related subjects (engineering, maths and computing).

Now, and this is the main subject of this blog post, there is the first customised version of JournalTOCs for Academic Libraries.  I think this is an extremely interesting development (although, as I keep saying, it’s still only one of many possible ways of utilising the metadata in question).  It is a new, effective and low-cost scholarly search tool which guarantees that the full text of any articles from thousands of journals will be available from search results for members of the university in question. The first customised version is available at the university I used to work at (Heriot-Watt) and has been developed by the ICBL with whom I worked on ticTOCs, Gold Dust, and various other services and projects such as TechXtra, PerX, and OneStep Jobs and Industry News.

WattJournals

The first customised version is called WattJournals.  Unless you are a member of Heriot-Watt University, you won’t be able to take full advantage of WattJournals in terms of retrieving the full text of articles, because it’s only from Heriot-Watt that the full text is guaranteed.  WattJournals essentially provides access to the content of those 4,500 or so Heriot-Watt University subscribed journals which have TOC RSS feeds.  WattJournals also enables searches to be saved for later use, and the export of citations to EndNote.

WattJournals illustration

The Heriot-Watt announcement about WattJournals gives more details, as does the JournalTOCsAPI blog.  It’s also being mentioned in the press, e.g. on Peter Scott’s Library Blog.

As more and more publishers produce journal TOC RSS feeds, and follow the CrossRef Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers, the number of TOCs and the quality of the metadata in them will increase and improve.

Did I mention that this is a low cost solution to scholarly searching?  I’m sure I did, but it’s worth stating again.  WattJournals may not have the bells and whistles of the fancy commercially produced database search services (though, because WattJournals is simple, it’s easy to use, and we all know that many students often appreciate that sort of thing), but unlike those commercial services, it is inexpensive to set up.  We (the ICBL and myself) are currently working on a plan to sort out the costs involved in setting up equivalent local customised version of JournalTOCs in other academic libraries.  There are some costs involved because it takes a little time and effort to do so, but these will be minimal.

As libraries are faced with financial cutbacks, many may be forced to cancel subscriptions to expensive database search services.  What will replace them?  Google?  How about a low-cost alternative similar to WattJournals?  If your library is interested in an equivalent service to WattJournals, which searches across your subscribed journals and guarantees full text availability for articles found in the latest Tables of Contents for your users, within an interface which matches your library website, please register an interest with icbl@icbl.hw.ac.uk

For more about the RSS and journal TOCs see this article by Lisa Rogers, or this article by Joe Hilton and myself.  As stated in the latter, “Efficient journal current awareness services are of the highest importance to researchers and academics, whatever their discipline. Ensuring efficient and easy access to the contents of the latest journal publications is also important for publishers of scholarly journals, a business that is estimated to be worth $5 billion per annum.”

I mentioned all sorts of other things which might be done with aggregated TOC RSS feeds, and feeds of other kinds.  One day, I hope that JournalTOCs will provide a customisable email alerting service, so that you can decide whether you want to be alerted, at periods under your control, when new TOCs of interest become available.  There are possibilities for linking JournalTOCs, and possibly local customised versions like WattJournals, to Twitter.

Perhaps you would like to receive tweets like the following, when a journal you’re particularly interested in publishes a new issue:

TocAlert @[YourTwitterAccount] New TOC: Geo-spatial Information Science http://tinyurl.com/33p68up

Perhaps you’d like to manage your journal TOC collection using your Twitter login, and see recent TOC items you’d viewed.  Perhaps you’d like to be able to manage alerts for new items in Institutional Repositories in a similar way.  And so on.  These things, and more, are possibilities for the future.

* I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but essentially there were two opposing views as to the purpose of the ticTOCs project.  One camp thought that it’s main purpose should be to provide only a nice directory listing of thousands of journal Tables of Contents RSS feeds which could then be used by researchers to find relevant TOC RSS feeds which would subsequently need to be loaded for viewing into RSS readers such as Google Reader or Bloglines, or via Internet browser RSS readers.  The other camp thought that aggregation and presentation of Tables of Contents via the ticTOCs interface was just as important, and that many more things (some of which I’ve mentioned above which are being developed by JournalTOCs), could be done with the metadata.