The good folks at ticTocs heard the call for open data, and they responded…exactly as I asked them to. Which makes me think I should have asked for a pony, too, but I’m still very, very happy!
Anyone can now download a simple tab-delimited text file describing all the journal table of contents RSS files they’ve assembled, for use however anyone wants.
The data include issns and eissns (where available), the title of the journal, and of course the URL of the RSS/Atom/Whatever feed.
The feeds themselves are all over the map — it’s whatever the publisher decides to provide, which might include abstract/volume/number/doi, or might just be the title of the article. But regardless, they represent data that are useful to our patron and are now available in a format that’s easy to exploit.
So…go to it?
3 Comments
Excellent work. I shall (go to it) on our own system.
Bill,
The shetland pony is on it’s way. Would it also be useful to include the ticTOCs URLs for TOC feeds in the text file? These URLs provide normalised (i.e. corrected, etc) content, which will display within ticTOCs. e.g. http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/?action=displayJournal&journalId=15711 would be the URL to the TOC of International Journal of Business and Emerging Markets. etc.
Bill, This is freakin’ awesome. What a valuable thing for a library discovery service. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.