I hadn't known about Zetoc either! How did I miss that?
They both seem very useful.
One of the tricks with using ticTOCs, is that the RSS feeds (provided by
the publisher) may include links to article full text that may or may
not be accessible to any given institution's patrons, depending on
whether that institution buys content from that publisher. Figuring out
how to have software either filter out these inaccessible links, or even
better yet figure out a way to generate an OpenURL link that might get
the user to the full text for that article from a _different_ source --
kind of tricky.
I'm not quite sure how to deal with this yet, thinking about wanting to
use TicTOCs stuff in my software. I am religiously opposed to giving
users links to things they can't access, without warning.
So in that sense, Zetoc is actually easier because it's simpler. Since
it doesn't in fact come from the vendor(s), it shouldn't include any
vendor-specific URLs, right? It does less, but since it does it
simpler, it's a bit more straightforward and 'normalized', I'm thinking.
So I'm excited about looking into Zetoc (Umlaut service!), thanks for
the pointer, I hadn't heard of Zetoc before.
Jonathan
Bucknell, Terry wrote:
I'll do my best to clarify the differences between Zetoc and ticTOCs, as best
as I understand them:
Zetoc covers about 20,000 journals, including journals that are print-only, or
that exist online but do not provide their own RSS feeds
ticTOCs covers about 12,000, limited to journals that provide their own RSS
feeds (so this excludes print-only journals in the main)
Zetoc is based the British Library's acquisitions of print issues, with data
re-keyed into to system, which means that it may be a few weeks between an
issue being published an appearing in Zetoc.
ticTOCs uses feeds from the publishers (or their online hosts), so they are as
up to date as the publisher wants to make them. Sometimes ticTOCs offers the
latest issue feed and the 'articles in press feed', if that is what the
publishers offer.
Zetoc only contains tables of contents
ticTOCs contains whatever the publisher chooses to include in its feed, which
may include abstracts, subject terms, DOIs, and graphical abstracts (especially
for chemistry titles)
Zetoc is hosted at MIMAS
ticTOCs is hosted at MIMAS
Zetoc provides email alerts of RSS feeds
ticTOCs provides RSS feeds only (but it's getting much easier to get your feeds
into your email client if that's the way you want to work, right?)
So to summarise, Zetoc covers more journals, but ticTOCs should be more up to
date and contains richer content.
Terry
Terry Bucknell
Electronic Resources Manager
Sydney Jones Library
University of Liverpool
Chatham St, PO Box 123
Liverpool, L69 3DA, UK
Tel: +44 (0)151 794 2692
Fax: +44 (0)151 794 2681
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dr R.
Sanderson
Sent: 12 February 2009 10:04
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] ticTOCs makes its data available to developers
How does this compare to Zetoc at Mimas, which also provides RSS feeds
for journal ToCs?
Rob
On Thu, 12 Feb 2009, Boheemen, Peter van wrote:
This is great !!! But don't forget the API !
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Bucknell, Terry
Sent: woensdag 11 februari 2009 23:12
To: [email protected]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] ticTOCs makes its data available to developers
As you may know, ticTOCs is a project funded by JISC in the UK to create
a single, freely available source of RSS feeds for tables of contents -
see http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/ . Our database now contains over 12,000
journals from over 430 publishers. Up until now the only way to get
feeds out of ticTOCs has been to use our web interface to search for
feeds and then export them as an OPML file, or one at a time to a feed
reader of your choice.
We are working on creating APIs to let groups like the code4lib
community extract our data in more flexible ways, but it has been
pointed out to us - see
http://robotlibrarian.billdueber.com/tictocs-give-us-a-file-pretty-prett
y-pretty-please/ - that all you really need (at least at first) is a
simple tab-delimited file that contains titles, ISSNs, and feed URIs for
all of the journals in tocTOCs. We now provide precisely this at
http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/text.php.
We hope that you will use this data to populate your catalog, A-Z
journals list or whatever with RSS feed icons/links, or embedded TOCs.
We look forward to the day when SFX, SerialsSolutions and the like are
all using our data!
Although the project phase of ticTOCs is very nearly at end end, we are
confident that we are very close to ensuring that the future of ticTOCs
is assured for at least the next three years, and will continue to be
free.
Share and enjoy.
Terry Bucknell
Electronic Resources Manager
Sydney Jones Library
University of Liverpool
Chatham St, PO Box 123
Liverpool, L69 3DA, UK
Tel: +44 (0)151 794 2692
Fax: +44 (0)151 794 2681
