tables of contents with RSS - ticTOCs

"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

# Find 11,396 scholarly journal Table of Contents (TOCs) from 413 publishers.
# View the latest TOC for each journal.
# Link to the full text of 290,590 articles (where institutional or personal subscription allows).

http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/

I assumed this would do three things:

1. keyword search against article titles
2. email alerts
3. provide OpenURLs and COINS for your link resolver and browser tools

It actually:

1. lets you search for journal titles and get the TOC for the journal
2. lets you build an OPML list of journal TOC RSS feeds

With the OPML you can at least get the info out on the web where you can do all the other stuff with it, but it seems a bit of a missed opportunity.

Incidentally this is free for anyone to use, you don't have to be in the UK or in higher education.

via my FriendFeed

Comments

[Roddy MacLeod]

Hi,

Keyword searching throughout all content in ticTOCs is being planned, as are various ways to be alerted about new content. Where publishers supply DOIs in their TOC RSS feeds, these are also used. A big problem is geting publishers to standardise their TOC RSS content. We're working on that as well.

As a Forrester Report http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,47150,00.html pointed out, many people don't use RSS or have any intention of using RSS, so an important part of ticTOCs is also to allow researchers to view TOC content, and use ticTOCs as a current awareness service, without them having to know anything about RSS.

Roddy