Transferring your journals (MyTOCs) from ticTOCs to JournalTOCs

We recently announced that the ticTOCs service will be discontinued at the end of March 2012. The teams of ticTOCs and JournalTOCs are working together to facilitate a seemly and conveniently transfer of ticTOCs users’ accounts and the content of their MyTOCS folders to JournalTOCs, so ticTOCs users can opt-in to continue enjoying the benefits of a TOC current awareness service without interruption.

In particular, the end of ticTOCs will affect the users who have signed up to have MyTOCs folders with ticTOcs. With the aim of helping those users, JournalTOCs has setup a web page from where ticTOCs users can transfer their accounts to JournalTOCs before the end of March. By completing the following simple steps, ticTOCs users can quickly and easily transfer their accounts and their MyTOCs folder to JournalTOCs:

1. Login at http://www.tictocs.ac.uk
2. You will see all your journals listed in the MyTOCs section
3. Click Select All button
4. Click Export Selected button
5. Save the tictocs.opml file
6. Go to http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/tictocs_users/
7. Enter your email address
8. Upload your tictocs.opml file

Once you have completed the above eight steps, JournalTOCs will recreate your ticTOCs account on the JournalTOCs website and automatically will upload all your ticTOCs journals to your “Followed Journals”. You will receive a welcome email confirming your registration and giving you useful information to make the most of JournalTOCs.

If some of your journals are not found in the JournalTOCs database, the JournalTOCs crawler will index the missing journals and automatically add them to your JournalTOCs account in the few days after your have registered with JournalTOCs.

Please contact journaltocs@icbl.hw.ac.uk if you have any query regarding the above procedure. Further information and guidance for ticTOCs users can be obtained by contacting ticTOCs@mimas.ac.uk.

ticTOCs is coming to a close

It is with regret that the decision has been taken to discontinue the ticTOCs service at the end of March 2012.

We advise you to use the journalTOCs service http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/ instead.

If you were using the ticTOCs API to pull journal feeds into your own pages then we recommend you switch to the journalTOCs API which works the same way – seehttp://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/develop.php.

If you were using the ticTOCs text.php file to populate your own service we recommend you instead make API calls to journalTOCs for each journal – seehttp://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/develop.php.

If you have any questions please contact ticTOCs@mimas.ac.uk.

Ingenta feeds now displaying correctly in IE

We spoke and Ingenta listened.  Ingenta RSS feeds are now displaying correctly for IE users so no more scary warning messages.  Thanks Ingenta.

Recommendations on RSS Feeds released

We are pleased to announce that the Recommendations on RSS Feeds for Scholarly Publishers drawn up by the Recommendations Working Group as part of the JISC funded ticTOCs project have now been released to the public. They can be found at;

http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2009/10/recommendations_on_rss_feeds_f.html

ticTOCs update

The ticTOCs service will shortly be transferring from the development server that has been its home since its beginning to a more robust and stable live server.  It is anticipated that disruption will be minimal. This will also provide us with the ideal opportunity to streamline and improve the database and the maintenance procedures.  The exact date for migration has not been specified yet but we will announce it here when it is confirmed.

New Helpdesk

The new ticTOCs helpdesk has been successfully set up and implemented in conjunction with our colleagues at MIMAS.  All enquiries submitted via the ticTOCs site will be channelled and tracked through the MIMAS helpdesk system.

Brief update on recent ticTOCs activity.

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins titles are in the process of moving to a new platform and their details have been updated accordingly in ticTOCs.

We will monitor the progress and changes to ensure consistency with the details in our database.

New simplified registration procedure

To simplify and speed up the new user registration process, we have removed the need for new users to confirm their registration.  A small number of new users had experienced difficulties confirming their accounts.  We appreciate this can be very frustrating so to minimize any potential delay we will be allowing new users to register and access their account without the need for waiting for a confirmation e-mail.

ticTOCs paper at IATUL Conference

A paper about ticTOCS will be presented at the 30th Annual IATUL Conference, Leuven, Belgium, on Tuesday 2nd June, by Dr Santiago Chumbe, ICBL, Heriot-Watt University. 

The title of the paper is: TicTOCron: an Automatic Solution for Propagating Quality Metadata to Scholarly TOC RSS Feed Metadata. by Santiago Chumbe, and Roddy MacLeod

Abstract:

Institutions and researchers stand to benefit from the facilitation of more widespread syndication of, and easier access to, Table of Content (TOC) RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds produced for scholarly journals. However, many journal TOC RSS feeds are at present being produced with erroneous, poor or incomplete metadata. This can hamper the usefulness of scholarly current awareness services, and also cause problems for individual subscribers to those feeds. This is exactly what the ticTOCron software toolkit aims to overcome. The ticTOCron toolkit automatically enhances poor, heterogeneous and incomplete metadata found in TOC RSS feeds by making use of a pre-defined “Best Practice” metadata scheme suitable for scholarly journals. In this work we depict the main issues and “bad practices” found in TOC RSS metadata obtained from more than 435 scholarly publishers. Then, we describe software solutions implemented via ticTOCron. Some references are made to the algorithms for generating semantic relations within, between and from the harvested TOCs and to the mechanisms for propagating “metadata associations” from a previously crawled metadata-rich reference set. However, an effort is made to avoid technical jargon and to replace complex technical descriptions with samples and simple comparisons. The original metadata is converted to a canonical format using the “Best Practices metadata set” for scholarly papers proposed by the ticTOCs Project. We also present the results produced by ticTOCron when it was used for enhancing and normalizing TOC RSS feeds collected from more than 12,000 journals. Finally we propose a sustainable and scalable computational model whereby the automatic solution is complemented and fine-tuned by a cost-effective human cross-validation process.

Roddy MacLeod
Heriot-Watt University

 

Using ticTOCs feed information to provide TOCs in OPACs

A couple of weeks ago I posted details of the paper by Lisa Rogers ”Transforming Current Awareness through RSS: How two projects (ticTOCs and Gold Dust) are using RSS to improve the information landscape for the 21st century researcher” which she presented at European Library Automation Group Conference (ELAG 09). This paper is now available through E-LIS.

Another paper at ELAG also covered ticTOCs. Peter van Boheemen gave a paper entitled “Using TicToc RSS feed collection”   This paper looks at how it is possible to use a file containing the URLs for the journals listed in ticTOCs in order to provide TOC information within OPACs.

Roddy MacLeod
Heriot-Watt University