Scholarly journals - new free service makes keeping up-to-date easy

Keeping up-to-date with the scholarly literature became much easier, thanks to a new service called ticTOCs - Journal Tables of Contents Service

ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service. It's free, easy to use and provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It helps scholars, researchers, academics and anyone else keep up-to-date with what's being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject.

Using ticTOCs, you can find journals of interest by title, subject or publisher, view the latest TOC, link through to the full text of over 250,000 articles (where institutional or personal subscriptions, or Open Access, allow), and save selected journals to MyTOCs so that you can view future TOCs (free registration is required if you want to permanently save your MyTOCs). ticTOCs also makes it easy to export selected TOC RSS feeds to popular feedreaders such as Google Reader and Bloglines, and in addition you can import article citations into RefWorks (where institutional or personal subscriptions allow).

You select TOCs by ticking those of interest - thousands of TOCs, within a tick or two (hence the name ticTOCs).

ticTOCs has been funded under the JISC Users & Innovations programme and has been developed by an international consortium consisting of the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.

For the full press release, please see: http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/scholarly-journals-new-free-service-makes-keeping-up-to-date-easy/

UKeiG Browser Share and Feed Readers - June 2007

Time for the monthly review of which browsers are being used to access the UKeiG web site and the feed readers that are hitting our RSS feeds. The total number of page views for June was 56,130.

There is not that much change in the browser report compared with last month: IE is number one with 64% (IE6=41%, IE7=23%), Firefox comes next with 28% (2.x=24%, 1.x=4%), Safari has 5% and Opera 1%. [Browsers that make up less than 1% of the stats are not included in the graph]

When it comes to RSS readers it is impossible to work out percentages. We can see which desktop and web based readers are accessing our feeds but we can not identify how many 'indiviudals' are looking at them. For example, Bloglines accesses our feeds for all those who are subscribed to our feeds but we see only one entry for 1, 10, 100, 1000 -who knows how many - subscribers. Even with a desktop/intranet client we have no idea how many ultimately read the feed. The best we can do is identify the feed readers that people use.

This month the top readers appear to :

Web based readers:

Bloglines
Google Reader
Pageflakes
Netvibes
Newsgator

Desktop readers
FeedReader
Outlook 2007/IE7 (impossible to distinguish between the two)
Great News
Omea
Awasu
RSS Bandit
Feed Demon

RSS, Blogs and Wikis - additional date and venue

The workshop on RSS, Blogs and Wikis being run on 27th April, 10th May and 17th May are now fully booked but the event is being re-run in Newcastle on Wednesday, 11th July 2007. Details and a booking form can be found on the UKeiG web site, or contact Christine Baker for further details on Tel & Fax: +44 (0)1969 625751, email: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk

Low-Spec RSS Feed Viewer for Mobile Devices

Posted on behalf of UKeiG member Steve Burgess:

In my frustration at not finding a simple RSS Feed Reader that supports HTTP Authentication, I have developed a mini-RSS Feed Reader that I can use on my mobile device. It does work on Firefox/I.E. etc on a standard desktop - but looks a bit rubbish on there as it is really designed for mobile devices. Having said that, it is easier to set up your list of feeds on the PC than it is on the PDA/Mobile.

This is not a full featured application - all it does is display the current feed items with links where relevant. The stylesheet has been optimised for mobile devices (e.g. PDAs and XHTML compliant browsers on mobile phones). It is not a WAP service (if anyone knows how I could make it WAP compliant, I'd be very interested to hear from you). I've tried it on my O2 XDA Mini S and my Nokia N70 and it works fine - haven't tested it on any other devices. Feedback about how (if) it works on other devices would be appreciated.

The system is linked to the My-RSS Feed Generator website (http://www.my-rss.co.uk/). To use the mobile feed reader you must sign up to My-RSS.co.uk - though you don't have to create a feed or log in again after first signing up if you don't want to. If you already use My-RSS, you can easily import a) your own feeds and b) "associated" feeds from My-RSS into your Mobile account by choosing the relevant option from the drop down select box. You can also import OPML profiles produced by other feed reading software.

I developed this because I need to keep track of password protected RSS feeds (non-protected feeds work too, btw) at work and on the move. If you want to make use of it, please feel free.

As I say, I would be interested in hearing from any WAP experts about whether it is a) possible to host WAP sites on a bog standard apache webserver (I do have full root access) and b) whether it is worth doing in any case.

The address for the site is: http://mobile.my-rss.co.uk/ but remember, you
need to be a member of, or become a member of, http://www.my-rss.co.uk/ first.

Any questions, comments or other feedback, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

stevepburgess at gmail dot com

Finish your RSS feeds!

Found this little gem on Peter Scott's RSS Compendium Blog.