Bradford-Based Emerald Leads New Joint Information Systems Committee
The new JISC project will develop an RSS news feed service that automatically pushes publisher and e-journal information into library catalogues.
The project which started in October 2005, will run for 10 months, completing in July 2006.
Emerald is a leading publisher of journals in management, and library & information services and their Head of Web Services, Paul Evans, is the Project Manager. Market-leading library systems and services supplier to the UK and Ireland academic and public library market, Talis, is the project?s technology partner.
Talis is working with Emerald to develop the publisher RSS and will develop the open source software environment to manage the service at educational establishments. The University of Derby, a pioneer in the use of open URL for linking to electronic journals, is working as the test bed and evaluation partner. JISC is backing the project with £15,000, and all partners have committed to match the funding, making a total of £60,000.
The open source software developed will be freely available to further and higher education establishments, publishers, and library management systems developers.
To drive TOCRoSS, an RSS server located at the publisher site will generate a ?feed? of information that can be automatically picked up by an RSS monitor located at the customer site. The project will also develop a plug-in module for the library management system to enable the catalogue and the OPAC to be updated with the information from the RSS stream.
The RSS 2.0 standard will be used as the technology base for the project, and TOCRoSS will include a proposal to extend the standard to encode metadata associated with e-journal publishing events, for example publication of a journal, issue or article.
With TOCRoSS in place, e-journal table of content data will be fed automatically into library catalogues without the need for cataloguing, classification or data entry. This will improve the accuracy of records, save time for library staff and deliver a more integrated OPAC experience to library users. It will be of particular value to academic libraries, where students often choose search engines such as Google over the library catalogue or myriad databases for tracking down articles and information.
Paul Evans, head of web services at Emerald Group Publishing, explains the value that the project will bring to both library staff and users, ?Cataloguing journals and articles has, up until now, been considered a ?luxury? in resource terms by many academic institutions. Once TOCRoSS is complete, cataloguing journal articles becomes automatic and the commonly asked question, ?Why can?t I find any articles on the OPAC?? becomes obsolete.?
Talis Research Group's Richard Wallis sees this as an example of the bringing together of new Internet Web Services technology and real business requirements. "RSS has, up until now, been used to deliver news-feeds or alerts of blog postings to individuals' desktops. This simple, yet powerful, technology has many potential applications in machine-to-machine communications. TOCRoSS will demonstrate how the innovative application of simple technologies enables the delivery of services that previously would not have been viable."
TOCRoSS will also deliver benefits to the publishing community, improvements in the dissemination of data and information to libraries will lead to a corresponding improvement in the value and management of e-journals and other resources.
A demonstrator service is a key deliverable of the project and is expected to be up and running by June 2006.
One of the objectives of the TOCRoSS team is to deliver a service that can be widely and easily adopted across the academic community. To ensure this happens, an audit will be carried out at the start of the project to establish a baseline for current practice and information availability at test sites. The project team will develop a beta implementation and deploy it at the test sites, then carry out an impact assessment to determine the effect on users and user behaviour.
When the project is complete, the TOCRoSS software will be available with an Open Source license, making it possible for publishers and library management system suppliers to use it freely with their products and services.
The technology solution developed for TOCRoSS will also be applicable to other publisher ?events?, such as book publication, author talks or calls for papers.
Progress updates and further information will be disseminated by the project team at industry events throughout 2006, including the UK Serials Group national conference taking place at the University of Warwick from 3rd ? 5th April 2006.