L&LR staff blog

Yesterday, I spotted (thanks @calire) that Google books have created a page that lets you browse their available magazine titles.

I can’t resist a free journal.

So I copied-&-pasted the entire page into MS Excel, used a handy function to extract the underlying URLs from the hyperlinked titles, did a bit of search-&-replace to make the list fit EBSCO’s data structure, and hey presto!

87 magazines from Google books on the E-journals A-to-Z

Image: a Google magazine, yesterday.

I also did a bit of bodging with EBSCO’s custom notes to pull in the journal cover images (c.f. what I did with ScienceDirect).

The whole thing will need re-creating every so often, but it’s only a 10-minute job.

Thank you, Google.

Edit (8th July) – slideshare.net does not seem to like displaying these slides on-screen, so here they are to download in MS PowerPoint format.

Here are the slides (on slideshare.net) of the 5-minute lightning talk I just gave at Mashed Library 2009, on using ticTOCs data to display e-journal ToC feeds, and on creating a new-titles feed with Yahoo Pipes, etc.

Many libraries, in HE and elsewhere, now display book cover images on their OPACs. Example (sorry, Dave): webcat.hud.ac.uk ~ no doubt, this is something we should be doing in the near future.

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In the meantime, I was thinking how desirable it would be to similarly enhance the Electronic Journals A-to-Z with images of the journals it contains. But, while databases of book-cover image files are relatively well-known and accessible [Amazon, LibraryThing], I’ve not been able to find any such general collection of journal covers available for re-use by libraries – is it that periodicals are more jealously guarded by individual publishers?

Or is it that they’re out there somewhere, but that I’ve not been able to find them?

What I have discovered is that there’s at least one provider of academic e-journals that makes its cover images freely available for re-use: Elsevier, purveyors of ScienceDirect, whose cover image files “may be used in systems in which Elsevier Science material is offered to end users“.

I’ve used Elsevier’s directory of journal cover images (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/products.cws_home/journal_cover_images_intro) to create a “Note” within A-to-Z admin, assigned to all ScienceDirect titles, which uses the ‘Link URL‘ fuction to display a journal cover image, matching the ISSN of the journal, on the live A-to-Z site.

Each image links to its journal home page.

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Problem #1 – if there is no image matching a particular ISSN, the A-to-Z still tries to display an image, and the result is a “red X” missing-image icon (). Can we live with that, for a relatively small number of journals, at least until Elsevier add the missing images to their site (hint, hint)? I’ve tried to filter out the missing images using Yahoo! Pipes, but haven’t managed to get it to work, yet.

Problem #2 – more of a question, really: can I abstract this method to pull in images from other publishers’ sites? And which publishers actively allow this, or provide a dedicated service as Elsevier do?

Welcome to issue fifteen of the Library and Learning Resources newsletter “The Buzz”. The aim of the newsletter is to share news and information between teams and campuses.

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