TOCRoSS
Whilst off the road [sounds better than just suffering the effects of flu!] last week, a couple of things almost passed me by.
One of these was the release of a press announcement [pdf] of the completion of the JISC project - TOCRoSS which I was involved in last year. Avid readers of Panlibus will remember that I first talked about this over a year ago.
The joint project between Emerald Group Publishing, The University of Derby, and Talis demonstrated that by pulling simple technologies and standards together you can achieve powerful effect.
By embedding Onix encoded journal article information in to a RSS 2.0 feed it was possible to build a process, capable of being automated, for those articles to be inserted in to a library catalogue without human intervention.
Publishers, such as Emerald, already publish RSS feeds for their journals. By making those feeds match the TOCRoSS standard, which does not stop them being read by normal RSS readers, other systems can monitor those feeds. The TOCRoSS Server, an open source framework which was built as part of the project, being such a system.
As part of the project a MarcXML output module was produced to run in the server framework. It is the output from this which is used to for import in to the Derby [Talis] Library system making the articles available as search results in their OPAC. See here.
Like all projects of this nature,it opens up many more possibilities than the initial scope or time allowed for. Some of those possibilities could be valuable additions to the work-flow of cataloguing or referencing Journal articles in discovery systems - the benefits are definitely not limited to populating OPACS.
March 1st, 2007 at 11:23 am
Richard,
The forthcoming ticTOC Project intends to take this work further.
“ticTOC intends be a catalyst for change by incorporating existing technology plus Web 2.0 concepts in the smart aggregation, recombination, synthesization, output and reuse of standardised journal Table of Contents (TOC) RSS feeds from numerous fragmented sources (journal publishers). These TOCs, and their content, will be presented in a personalisable and interactive web-based interface (this is referred to in this document as a ‘TOCosphere’) that requires little or no understanding, by the user, of the technical or procedural concepts involved. It is called ticTOC because in certain instances it will involve the selective ‘ticking’ of appropriate TOCs, and also because ticTOC is a memorable name – important in today’s online environment.”
Roddy