Journal TOC + RSS = TOCRoSS
The formal press release regarding JISC project - TOCRoSS was published today.
The 10 month joint project between Emerald Group Publishing Ltd,The University of Derby, and Talis will deliver standards, open source software and a test bed example installation at Derby.
The project team will be proposing an open standards extension to the RSS 2.0 standard to encode metadata associated with e-journal publishing events, for example publication of a journal, issue or article.
To drive TOCRoSS, an RSS server located at the publisher site will generate a ‘feed’ of information that can be automatically picked up by an RSS monitor located at the customer site. The project will also develop a plug-in module for the library management system to enable the catalogue and the OPAC to be updated with the information from the RSS stream.
With TOCRoSS in place, e-journal table of content data will be fed automatically into library catalogues without the need for cataloguing, classification or data entry. This will improve the accuracy of records, save time for library staff and deliver a more integrated OPAC experience to
library users. It will be of particular value to academic libraries, where students often choose search engines such as Google over the library catalogue or myriad databases for tracking down articles and information.
Full article [pdf]
Yet another use of RSS, this time for consumption by both humans & systems.
April 10th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Richard
Just seen an article about this in ‘Research Information’ (www.researchinformation.info/ but article not online yet).
This looks like exactly the sort of thing we are keen to do.
Though when we be able to use such tools in the released version of Prism/Alto?
The article mentions july 2006 as the projects completition, but will we also need to wait for Alto to support this technology as well.
This seems to be a bit of a theme. This blog, and other communication outlets, shows so many excellent ideas (whisper), open development and the right direction. But this is no good if we can not see them come through in to the core products!
Thanks
Chris
April 10th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Chris,
The hardcopy found its way on to my desk this morning. Like many articles, it has be derived from a press release. The full release can be found here.
As it says, TOCRoSS is a JISC funded research project. There will be three main outputs from the project.
A published standard for the transmission of journal article information within an RSS feed.A demonstration software implementation.An analysis of the impact and benefits of such a service both actually at the University of Derby, and as perceived by other libraries, publishers, and library management system suppliers.
The software used in the implementation will consist of:
An RSS feed of journal article publishing events - hosted by Emerald Insight.An open source TOCRoSS server framework which will monitor the feed provided by Emerald and any others that implement the same.A Talis plug-in for that server which will take the publishing events and use them to create catalogue entries.
It will of course be possible for other LMS suppliers to create their own plug-ins for the server.
Although Derby, Emerald & Talis will all be learning from JISC this project, there is no commitment from any of the parties to create a production supportable version of the services as part of their normal operations.
It is the nature of such projects, to take stock at the end to see what has been produced, and learnt, before making any decisions on what happens next.
That is not to say that all three organisations have high hopes that the results and experience of the TOCRoSS project will stimulate future developments.
Richard.