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.

…this was a talk that Joss and I gave yesterday, around the idea of using WordPress MU + Scriblio + Triplify to create a semantic, union catalogue. Joss has already blogged it (and for some reason, for him Slideshare worked fine…?).

Paul and I have just presented our ‘lightning talk’ on the use of WordPress MU and Scriblio to create a platform for publishing multiple OPAC catalogues and then exposing the aggregate data as RDF using Triplify. I blogged about this idea a while back and this is the first presentation we’ve given. Not sure what people made of it. Too ambitious? Threatening? Confusing? All I know is that from where I’m standing, it would require a relatively small amount of funding to show it working in principle with a handful of library catalogues. The difficult part would be scaling it to work for 100+ catalogues (though bear in mind, wordpress.com hosts 6 million sites) and satisfying the politics of each institution. Still, that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

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.

(With apologies to Christian Bök for the title.)

I’m going to the long-anticipated Mashed Library 2009 (“Mash Oop North“) tomorrow at the University of Huddersfield.

If you want to follow the action from afar, here’s what one of the organisers (guess who?!) has suggested in a post on the event blog:

If you’re wanting to keep track of what’s happening on the day, there’s a few things you can keep an eye on…

Twitter

The hashtag for the event is #mashlib09 and you can keep track using Twitter Search or Twitterfall.

Ideas from the event

We’ll be encouraging delegates to publish their ideas under a CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence and you’ll be able to see them all via this RSS feed.

Ian’s Text Wall

Ian McNaught, who works at Huddersfield Uni, has developed an experimental SMS Text Wall which we’ll be playing around with at the event. It currently works with Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Videos

We’re hoping to video all 6 of the opening sessions. Unfortunately we’re not able to stream them live but we’ll try and make them available to view online as quickly as possible. (If any delegates have experience of putting video online, please make yourself known on the day!)

There’s also the useful Mashed Library Ning site at: mashedlibrary.ning.com

I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow’s event, mainly because last year’s (the inaugural, held in London) was so interesting, and also because this year I’ve got the chance to talk about a couple of the mashup-inspired things I/we’ve got in the pipeline. Also because of this, and due in no small part to this.

I’ll be tweetin’ wi’ t’ best of ‘em on the day, and I promise a full writeup (plus slides from my two ‘lightning talks’) when I get back.

You can now subscribe to my RSS feed of new e-journal titles via email, should you so wish.

• Here’s a link to the email sign-up form.

I prefer to keep up-to-date with RSS feeds using Google Reader (I don’t want or need anything more in my Outlook inbox!), but if email’s your bag and/or you prefer to have all your information in one place, then at least there’s now the option to add these to your inbox.

I have a feeling that there’s just too much in this feed (c.90 new titles added over the Bank Holiday weekend) to be useful as a public i.e. library-user-focused service. Too many titles, no subject filtering (yet…), too much (for want of a better word) noise in the form of low-academic-interest titles added to packages such as Factiva.

But I do think this could be a really useful current-awareness tool for Academic Subject Librarians.

In February, I wrote about  how I’d added more than 5,000 ticTOCs RSS feeds to the A-to-Z, so that researchers can easily find and subscribe to Table-of-Contents (ToC) updates from journals in their field. I think this is an indispensable current awareness service, and I’m pleased it’s being promoted at the ‘Working Smarter With the Web‘ workshops.

(An aside: that ticTOCs data is overdue to be re-generated and reloaded onto the A-to-Z. This is next on the long list of e-journal packages for the “e team” to review.)

That’s all well and good, but there’s a clear need for a current awareness service ‘one level above’ the individual ToCs. That is, we could (and should) be providing an RSS feed of new e-journal titles.

At the moment, the EBSCO A-to-Z platform doesn’t provide this feature (I really do hope it’s something that EBSCO are considering developing themselves), and so in the past we’ve had to resort to emails, spreadsheets, etc.—all with varying degrees of success—just to keep people up to date with what new e-journals have become available.

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So, I’ve created a rough-and-ready working demo of a ‘New e-journals at Lincoln‘ RSS feed for the A-to-Z. It’s not supported by EBSCO, so it’ll require a bit of manual intervention to keep it running (it’ll be a nice five-minute daily task for the “e team” to take on!), but has the potential to be a really important enhancement to the e-journals service.

Next time you go to the A-to-Z site, you’ll see a new tab – next to the existing ‘Titles’ tab – which I’ve labelled ‘New Titles (RSS)‘. This new tab links to a page containing information about the RSS feed, with a prominent link to the feed itself, plus a display of the 10 most-recently-added titles in the feed.

The links in the ‘ten most recent…’ list should go directly to the A-to-Z record for that title. The feed link itself you can paste into your favourite feed reader (I use Google Reader). I’m working on enabling email subscription to the feed. We should also be able to take this feed and filter/manipulate it to create (for example) subject-specific lists in Blackboard.

I’ve also made the feed autodiscoverable (c.f. my earlier post), so it should display in the browser toolbar (this will vary between browsers).

This is how the feed is auto-discovered by Firefox browser.

I still need to do some work on creating better documentation for users of the feed, and for the process of adding new titles within L&LR.

I’ll also need to do a bit of testing to make sure everything’s working as it should be, and iron out my feed-validation bugs.

When the time is right, I’ll launch the service more publicly.

Paul

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P.S. Here’s how I did it:

1. The first stage is the most clunky – it involves getting information about the newly-added titles out of the closed box that is the Electronic Journals A-to-Z. EBSCO provide a daily report (available only to administrators) of “Titles added to Packages in my Collection“. This data can be exported on a daily basis in tab-delimited format.
   
2. Next, I created a spreadsheet using Google Docs and published it to the Web. The tabbed data from the A-to-Z admin report is pasted in to the spreadsheet, so it becomes openly accessible. Using Google Docs also means that I can invite other people to act as editors of the spreadsheet, and create public web forms to add titles that don’t appear in EBSCO’s daily report (not all of our e-journal packages are managed by EBSCO, so the data will need supplementing when we add custom titles).
3. The data output of the Google spreadsheet is then fed into Yahoo! Pipes, an excellent application for ‘mashing up’ and processing data. You can inspect the Yahoo! pipe for yourself, at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/lincoln/newejournals. If you create an account on Yahoo!, you can clone this (or any) pipe and modify it to create your own data mashup.
   
4. The Yahoo! pipe takes the raw Google spreadsheet data, filters it according to various rules, and exports a valid * RSS feed of new items, in reverse order by date.
5. * Well, it’s nearly valid. I need to do a bit of cleaning up of the pipe (I did say this was a working demo), mainly so I can pass the feed through Feedburner, which will allow email subscriptions. But it works well enough!
6. Finally, I created the new tab on the A-to-Z public site, and added the details to the page (the ‘ten most recent’ list was created using feed2js). The code for the autodiscoverable feed was pasted into the top of our customised A-to-Z template.

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