Tables of Contents in e-journal catalogue records

You may have noticed that many of our catalogue records for e-journals now include the tables of contents (TOC) of the latest issue, with links to each article. For example, take a look at Nature.

We pull in the table of contents using the publisher's RSS feed via the JournalTOCs service, which sprang from the ticTOCs service that we led.

This is an experimental service and we are aware of some glitches. In some cases the article links might lead to a site where we don't have access to the journal, even though we do have access to the journal elsewhere. We link to articles via EZproxy for off-campus access but this sometimes leads to an EZproxy error message because we try link to a site that EZproxy doesn't know about.

We are endeavouring to minimise the number of such dead-ends, but if you do get led astray then follow our main 'View this journal online' link to visit the site where we can access the journal online (though it is possible that we don't have access to the latest issues, especially if our main link leads to a full-text database from EBSCO or ProQuest).

We welcome your feedback about whether you find this service useful, and please let us know about any glitches and we'll try to put them right, within reason.

ticTOCs current awareness service is now live

ticTOCs, the JISC-funded project led by the University of Liverpool to create a one-stop shop for RSS table of contents feeds is now available at http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/.

See the full announcement at:

http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/scholarly-journals-new-free-service-makes-keeping-up-to-date-easy/

Note that it currently covers over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. If you are about to go off on your Xmas break you might like to try setting up some feeds to keep yourself up to date while you are away…

Our own web page about RSS feeds for current awareness:

http://www.liv.ac.uk/library/techserv/ejrnl/rss.html

explains how to use ticTOCs to find the feeds you want and how to export those feeds to a ‘proper’ feed reader. (The idea is for people to include the feeds in some sort of personalised page that they look at every day – that could be Microsoft Outlook!)

For those who want to be alerted to articles-on-a-topic rather than complete tables of contents, our page above advises creating saved search alerts on a database (as an RSS feed rather than an email alert if you prefer).

You are of course welcome to revisit the ticTOCs site to view your chosen feeds but it has no built-in alerting mechanism (yet?) so we would encourage people to take their feeds elsewhere. Other feed readers may also have the facilities to group/merge feeds into folders, search within feeds, etc. Our priority on the project has been to build the most comprehensive database of feeds, not to reproduce feed-reader functionality that is already available in many other places.