I’ve written several times about TicTOCs (most recently in TicTOCs: It’s About Time). TicTOCs is a JISC-funded free service that collects RSS feeds for journal table of contents. If you go to the TicTOCs site you can search for journals (by title, ISSN, etc.), and find the RSS feed for that journal’s table of contents. They also offer a downloadable list of all the journals in their index, providing title, URL of the RSS feed, and ISSN. This should allow easy importing into a library catalog, federated search tool, or link resolver.
At least one library has implemented this feature. Peter van Boheemen, in his blogWebQuery @ Wageningen UR, describes how he added TicTOCs journal feeds to his catalog. A journal with a table of contents listed in TicTOCs has a link on the right side of the display to “Show recent articles” (this example is Die Naturwissenschaften from the Wageningen UR catalog):
Clicking on that link displays the table of contents for the most recent issue of the journal in the lower part of the screen. Each article is linked to the full text (in this particular example, directly to SpringerLink, but it could just as easily go through a library’s proxy server or link resolver to find a copy licensed for that library):
Is your library using TicTOCs like this? Share your site in the comments.
Inspired by Peters integration we did our own ticTOC integration. But we bundled the link to the ticTOC RSS feed with the link resolver services (we call our sfx implementation e-JULIA). Basicly what I did was to convert the flat file into a xml file and the a small webservice for ISSN lookup. You can try it out by searching our OPAC – JULIA at http://julia.hj.se/F/?func=find-b-0&CON_LNG=eng try journal of clinical nursing if you can’t think of a example.