New & Noteworthy

Citation

(2006), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 23 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2006.23923bab.001

New & Noteworthy

NCSU Libraries

Release Endeca-Powered Facetted Catalog

The North Carolina State University Libraries have released the first library deployment of a revolutionary new online catalog. Leveraging the Guided NavigationTM capabilities of the Endeca Profind1™platform, the NCSU Libraries' new catalog provides the speed and flexibility of popular online search engines while capitalizing on existing catalog records.

After submitting a search, users are presented with a list of matching results ranked by relevance and are offered several navigation refinement options based on characteristics of the materials in the results set. Navigation options include topic, author, genre, language, material type, format, and availability. Sorting options include publication date, title, author, call number, and popularity. To help users understand the navigation choices they have made, the application displays a "breadcrumb" of the refinements selected that allows backtracking and broadening of search results. Catalog users can also browse the entire collection by subject, without issuing a search at all, which is a feature that no other library catalog supports.

Endeca's approach to information retrieval mimics the human discovery process by integrating the two most common means of finding information online – searching and browsing – allowing people to continually adapt and hone their search based on their own determination of relevancy. The NCSU Libraries' new catalog allows users to browse their results along pre-defined facets with context-specific values automatically generated from the results set itself. These dynamic navigation schemes and search refinement options are made possible by the Endeca ProFind™ platform, which takes advantage of all of the relationships in the catalog data and how those relationships themselves relate to each other. Resembling what librarians call "faceted classification," this data-driven approach reflects the multiple ways any resource can be described, rather than its location in a rigid hierarchy of categories.

For example, in a keyword search for "deforestation," library catalogs typically return a very long, unranked list of results containing that term anywhere in the title or description. By contrast, the same search in the NCSU Libraries' new catalog not only ranks the results by relevance, but also allows users to browse or narrow them down by sub-topic – environmental aspects or economic development, for example – or by genre, format, region, and many other variables. In a few easy steps, one student may locate an online atlas of Russia's intact forest landscapes, while another chooses among four biographies of Amazon rain forest activist Chico Mendes, meeting very different research needs even though they initiated their searches in exactly the same way.

This new catalog is receiving much attention and discussion within the library community. Links to blog discussion and articles are available from the NCSU Endeca Implementation web site.

NCSU Catalog: www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/

NCSU Endeca Implementation: www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/

Endeca: http://endeca.com

OCLC

Acquires Openly Informatics

Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) has purchased the assets of Openly Informatics, a leading provider of linking software and services for the library market, so that both organizations can strengthen their products and services to benefit OCLC libraries and clients of Openly Informatics.

Openly Informatics' 1.2 million-record database of linking metadata for electronic resources will be used to enrich OCLC WorldCat, the world's largest database of bibliographic information. The enhanced records will improve WorldCat applications such as FirstSearch WorldCat, WorldCat Resource Sharing, WorldCat Collection Analysis and Open WorldCat. OCLC WorldCat, in turn, will extend the Openly Informatics database by contributing metadata covering materials in other electronic formats, including electronic books, digital audio books, digital theses and dissertations.

As part of the agreement, Dr Eric S. Hellman, founder and president of Openly Informatics, and his staff, will join OCLC to continue to manage, innovate and support Openly Informatics services. Dr Hellman will serve as director of the new division, operating as OCLC Openly Informatics.

OCLC is a non-profit organization that has provided computer-based cataloging, reference, resource sharing, eContent and preservation services to 54,000 libraries in 109 countries and territories. OCLC and its worldwide member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, making it the world's largest and richest online resource for finding library materials.

Founded in 1998, Openly Informatics is a leading linking software and metadata company headquartered in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Openly Informatics has consistently been first to market with a number of innovations, including release of the first open source link server, the first to integrate A-Z list functionality within a link server, and the first to develop a link server compliant with OpenURL 1.0.

www.oclc.org

www.openly.com

SirsiDynixInstitute.com

Provides Free Web Seminars, Latest Buzzwords

SirsiDynix Institute is an ongoing forum for professional development in the library community, provided by the SirsiDynix Corporation. The mission of the SirsiDynix Institute is to support librarianship and advance the work of librarians around the world by providing free access to industry-leading speakers and events.

In each bi-weekly web conference, presenters share their expertise to enhance understanding of current topics important to librarians. Topics addressed in the February 2006 seminars included: Geo-Marketing: Customer-Based Research; Weblogs & Libraries; and The 2.0 Meme – Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Librarian 2.0. Past presentations of the SirsiDynix Institute are available free of charge in the SirsiDynix Institute Web Seminar Archive.

An additional service of the SirsiDynix Institute is Word to the Wise, a list of library technology words to help you stay up to date on the latest technology buzzwords surrounding the library industry. Subscribers can receive a new Word to the Wise by e-”mail every week, or visit the Word to the Wise Archive to view definitions from past weeks.

www.sirsidynixinstitute.com

Open Educational Resources

Free Access to Materials from Universities Worldwide

A new web initiative launched in November 2005 at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) will connect anyone with internet access and the desire to learn to a world of free, high-quality open educational materials. The Development Gateway Foundation's "Open Educational Resources" portal aims to equalize access to education and help people in developing countries improve their chances for a better life.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research. The site will serve as a freely accessible venue for the aggregation and dissemination of OERs worldwide. The portal features free course materials and other educational content offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Chinese Open Resources for Education and other institutions around the world. Content for the site will be aggregated by African Virtual University and Utah State University/Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. With the permission of the National Library of The Netherlands, learning subjects and related materials for the site will be classified using the DutchBasic Classification™, originated by UKB, c/o, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of The Netherlands, and OCLC PICA, Leiden, The Netherlands.

While content on the OER portal is particularly geared to educators, students and selflearners in developing countries it is available for everyone. The portal will also facilitate communication among the growing online community of providers and users of free, online educational resources.

Open Educational Resources Initiative: http://topics.developmentgateway.org/openeducation

The eGranary Digital Library

Storing the Seeds of Knowledge

The eGranary Digital Library provides millions of Internet resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet access. Through a process of copying web sites and delivering them to intranet web servers inside partner institutions in developing countries, this digital library delivers educational materials for instant access over local area networks (LANs).

Seven out of eight people in the world do not have access to the Internet and neither do most schools in the developing world. Those schools that do have Internet access are spending enormous amounts of money for their slow and unreliable connections. For those without an Internet connection, this library is a phenomenon. Web pages open 5,000 times faster from the eGranary Digital Library and schools can save tens of thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs every year. With installations in more than 70 educational institutions in Africa, Bangladesh and Haiti, the eGranary Digital Library provides lightening fast access to educational materials including video, audio, books, journals, and web sites, even where no internet access exists.

The eGranary Digital Library represents the collective efforts of hundreds of authors, publishers, programmers, librarians, instructors and students around the globe. Some of the many authors and publishers who have granted permission to distribute their works via the eGranary include: US Centers for Disease Control, Columbia University, Cornell University, MIT Press, Unesco, World Bank and WHO.

Developed in 2001, the eGranary Digital Library was created out of the WiderNet Project, a non-profit organization based at the University of Iowa. The eGranary needs more authors and publishers to help grow its collection to 10 million documents, volunteers to help collect and categorize new materials and librarians and teachers to help get the library installed in thousands of schools, hospital and universities.

How the eGranary Digital Library works:

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  Web sites with rich educational content are identified. Since the beginning of the World Wide Web, millions of individuals and organizations have digitized their information to share with the general public over the internet. Capitalizing on this phenomenon, the eGranary Digital Library looks for web sites with pertinent digitized academic information (often guided by requests of its African partners) to add to its "wish list."

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  Securing the author's or publisher's permission to copy their materials is done by email. The request is to replicate materials for educational institutions in developing countries with inadequate Internet connectivity. Depending on the content area, 50-90 percent usually agree.

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  The permitted materials are copied to a hard drive. Web site "scraping" software is used to make a duplicate of the permitted materials on the eGranary Digital Library server. Sometimes an entire web site is copied; sometimes just the portions containing the most useful information.

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  Copies of the collection are made and distributed to subscriber universities. Using large hard disks, copies of the eGranary Digital Library are delivered to subscriber universities, most of which already have servers and local area networks in place, so they simply add the eGranary hard drive to their existing server.

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  The WiderNet Project is currently developing a way to use various technologies, like satellite digital radio, to update the collection on an ongoing basis.

eGranary Digital Library: www.widernet.org/digitalLibrary/

The WiderNet Project: www.widernet.org/

Managing and Preserving

Geospatial Data and Electronic Records

The Geospatial Electronic Records web site serves as a portal to resources on managing and preserving geospatial data and related electronic records. The web site is intended for communities of archivists, geospatial data librarians, electronic records managers, geographical data product developers and others who share an interest in geospatial data management and preservation. Links provide access to categories of resources that are accessible online and include references to relevant standards, guides, reports, programs, societies, and initiatives.

The Geospatial Electronic Records web site and its contents have been developed as part of the project, Managing and Preserving Geospatial Electronic Records, which has been conducted by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) of Columbia University and funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), under Grant 2003-038. The project has investigated the requirements for state and local government archivists, records managers, and other institutional recordkeepers to manage and preserve electronic records with significant geospatial components, especially those records generated by Geographic Information System (GIS) software. The project also has identified and recommended practical and appropriate policies, techniques, standards, and practices to manage geospatial electronic records (GERs) to support their long-term retention and dissemination and to facilitate their usability and utility as important information resources of significant historical interest. The intention of the web site is to help municipal, county, and state agencies, and other organizations to improve their ability to efficiently preserve and reuse their increasingly vital geospatial information resources.

www.ciesin.columbia.edu/ger/

HUL

Global Digital Format Registry in Development

The Harvard University Library (HUL) has received a grant of $600,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the development of a registry of authoritative information about digital formats. Detailed information about the format of digital resources is fundamental to their preservation. The two-year project will result in a new Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR), which will become a key international infrastructure component for the digital preservation programs of libraries, archives and other institutions with the responsibility for keeping digital resources viable over time.

Development of the Registry will be informed by the considerable expertise in digital preservation the Harvard libraries have acquired through Harvard's Library Digital Initiative (LDI). An earlier Harvard contribution to the international digital preservation community is JHOVE (http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/), a tool developed in cooperation with JSTOR that is widely used to analyze and validate the format of digital objects.

The wide diversity and rapid pace of adoption and abandonment of digital formats present an ongoing problem for long-term preservation efforts. As noted in the October 2002 planning report of the Library of Congress ("Preserving our digital heritage: plan for the national digital information infrastructure preservation program"), "Longevity of digital data and the ability to read those data in the future depend upon standards for encoding and describing, but standards change over time."

GDFR will be established as a distributed service in which participating research libraries, archives, and other organizations with preservation responsibilities can contribute, as well as use, format-typing information. Major US research libraries, such as MIT Libraries and the University of Pennsylvania Library are supporting Harvard's efforts to develop the GDFR.

For current information and updates on GDFR, including information about job opportunities, visit the project web site at http://hul.harvard.edu/gdfr/

Preserving E-mail

Digital Preservation Testbed Application Available

The Digital Preservation Testbed project from the Nationaal Archief of The Netherlands has developed an application for the task of preserving email in accordance with legal requirements: TestbedXMaiL. This application is now freely available to download from the web site www.digitaleduurzaamheid.nl/index.cfm?paginakeuze=299&categorie=6

This application demonstrates how email messages can be created in a sustainable manner and preserved for the long term using eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Sustainable preservation ensures that the authenticity, accessibility, and readability of a digital record is secured for the duration of a given preservation period.

The Testbed XMaiL application is freely available as open source software. The source code is publicly available. Any organization can download, adapt, and use TestbedXMaiL; however, it is not immediately ready for use. Anyone that wishes to use it must tailor it to the specific requirements of their own organization. The National Archives wishes to encourage support for software such as the Testbed XMaiL in Document Management Systems and Records Management Applications in the future.

SKOS

Core 2nd Public Working Drafts Released

Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) Core is a simple, flexible and extensible language for expressing in a machine-understandable form the structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, "folksonomies", other types of controlled vocabulary, and also concept schemes embedded in glossaries and terminologies. The SKOS Core Vocabulary is an application of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Using RDF allows data to be linked to and/or merged with other data. In practice, this means that distributed sources of data can be meaningfully composed and integrated.

The W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group has announced the publication of the following technical reports as second W3C Public Working Drafts:

The SKOS Core Guide is a guide to the recommended usage of the SKOS Core Vocabulary, for readers who already have a basic understanding of RDF concepts: www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-swbp-skos-core-guide-20051102/

The "SKOS Core Vocabulary Specification"' gives a reference-style overview of the SKOS Core Vocabulary, and describes policies for ownership, naming, persistence and change management: www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-swbp-skos-core-spec-20051102/

These reports are second public Working Drafts, and are works in progress. The Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group is committed to a public, consensus-driven design environment for SKOS Core, and to this end conducts all SKOS-related discussion in public, in particular drawing on feedback from the Semantic Web Interest Group mailing list: public-esw-thes@w3.org.

For links to tutorials, presentations, development information, version history, translations, proposals, datasets and more see the SKOS Core home page: www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core/

VRA

New Version of VRA Core Data Standard

The Visual Resources Association Data Standards Committee has announced that the VRA Core 4.0 Beta Draft documents and XML schema are available for review. The VRA Data Standards Committee (DSC) has updated the Core Categories in order to conform to ongoing developments in data standards, data sharing, and data storage technology. This new version is known as Core 4.0.

The VRA Core is a data standard for the cultural heritage community. It consists of a metadata element set (units of information such as title, location, date, etc.), as well as an initial blueprint for how those elements can be hierarchically structured. The element set provides a categorical organization for the description of works of visual culture as well as the images that document them.

Establishing an official encoding of the data elements into a data format (such as XML) is a logical next step in the development of efficient systems for cataloging, retrieval, and record sharing. To this end, VRA Core 4.0 proposes an XML Schema as an expression of the metadata element set to be used primarily for record sharing and exchange purposes. This latest edition of the Core contains significant changes from the previous version, Core 3.0. The changes have been made in order to make the Core XML-compliant.

DSC home page: www.vraweb.org/datastandards/VRADS_Main_page.htm

VRA Core 4.0: www.vraweb.org/datastandards/VRA_Core4_Welcome.html

CrossRef

Two New CrossRef Initiatives

CrossRef, the independent cross-publisher linking service, announced two forthcoming initiatives that will enhance the way search engines index scholarly content: CrossRef Web Services and the Search Partner Program. These services are expected to launch in early 2006.

CrossRef Web Services will create an easy-to-use tool for authorized search and web services partners to gather metadata to streamline web crawling. The CrossRef metadata database contains records for the more than 18 million items from over 1,500 publishers, the majority of whom are expected to choose to participate in this optional new service. The CrossRef Search Partner program provides standard terms of use for search engines, libraries, and other partners to use the metadata available from CrossRef Web Services – terms that promote copyright compliance and the important role published works of record play in scholarly communication.

CrossRef Web Services also provides search partners with a map to published scholarly content on the web. In this way, it functions as a notification, or "ping", mechanism for the publication of new content. Alerting crawlers to new or revised content to be indexed greatly reduces the need for ongoing re-crawling of publisher sites.

These new services from CrossRef will improve search results by enabling the use of the digital object identifier (DOI), in all search results. CrossRef DOIs provide persistent links to scholarly content, helping users get to the authoritative, published version of the content they are searching for, even when the content changes location or ownership. CrossRef's OpenURL interface (one of the first OpenURL resolvers to be fully compliant with the new NISO OpenURL 1.0 standard) is already in place and in use by a growing number of libraries.

CrossRef web site: www.crossref.org

CNI

Program Plan, Project Briefings, Podcasts from CNI

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Program Plan for 2005-2006 is now available at the CNI web site (www.cni.org). CNI's work is structured around three central themes seen as the essential foundations of the vision of advancing scholarship and intellectual productivity: developing and managing networked information content; transforming organizations, professions, and individuals; and building technology, standards, and infrastructure. The specific program initiatives that further CNI's themes evolve from year to year. The initiatives and strategies planned for 2005-2006 are described in the Program Plan; most build upon and continue efforts already underway. Many of the initiatives seek to make strategic progress relevant to more than one theme.

Also available at the CNI web site:

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  Proceedings and presentations from Managing Digital Assets: Strategic Issues for Research Libraries, a symposium jointly sponsored by CNI, The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and the Digital Library Federation (DLF) in October 2005.

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  Project briefings delivered at the CNI Fall 2005 Task Force Meeting held in December 2005.

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  Podcast interviews with several key speakers and attendees at the Fall 2005 CNI Task Force Meeting, including Tony Hey, VP for Technical Computing at Microsoft, and Brewster Kahle, Director and Co-founder’of the Internet Archive.

CNI is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. Some 200 institutions representing higher education, publishing, network and telecommunications, information technology, and libraries and library organizations make up CNI's Members.

2005-2006 Program Plan: www.cni.org/program/

Presentations from Managing Digital Assets: www.arl.org/forum05/

Podcast interviews: http://connect.educause.edu/folksonomy/cni

Social Networks, Gender and Internet Use

Two New Pew Reports Available

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a report describing how the Internet improves Americans' capacity to maintain their social networks and how they gain a big payoff when they use the internet to activate those networks to solicit help. The report is based on two surveys and finds that the internet and e-mail expand and strengthen the social ties that people maintain in the offline world. The surveys show that people not only socialize online, but they also incorporate the internet into their quest for information and advice as they seek help and make decisions.

Disputing concerns that heavy use of the Internet might diminish people's social relations, the report finds that the Internet fits seamlessly with Americans' in-person and phone encounters. With the help of the internet, people are able to maintain active contact with sizable social networks, even though many of the people in those networks do not live close to them. The report, The Strength of Internet Ties, highlights how email supplements, rather than replaces, the communication people have with others in their network. The full report is available at: www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/172/report_display.asp

A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, How Women and Men Use the Internet, shows how men's and women's use of the internet has changed over time.

Some highlights: The percentage of women using the internet still lags slightly behind the percentage of men. Women under 30 and black women outpace their male peers. However, older women trail dramatically behind older men.

That said, men and women are more similar than different in their online lives, starting with their common appreciation of the internet's strongest suit: efficiency. Both men and women approach with gusto online transactions that simplify their lives by saving time on such mundane tasks as buying tickets or paying bills. Men and women also value the internet for a second strength, as a gateway to limitless vaults of information. Men reach farther and wider for topics, from getting financial information to political news. Along the way, they work search engines more aggressively, using engines more often and with more confidence than women. Women are more likely to see the vast array of online information as a "glut" and to penetrate deeper into areas where they have the greatest interest, including health and religion. Women tend to treat information gathering online as a more textured and interactive process – one that includes gathering and exchanging information through support groups and personal email exchanges.

Report: www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/171/report_display.asp

VRD

2005 Conference Materials Available Online

The Virtual Reference Desk (VRD) is pleased to announce that materials from the VRD 2005 Conference are now available online at WebJunction. WebJunction is an online community of libraries and other agencies sharing knowledge and experience to provide broad public access to information technology. The 2005 e-proceedings offer presentations, papers, bibliographies, handouts, and other resources from the 7th Annual VRD Conference held in Burlingame, CA on November 14-15, 2005. The 2005 VRD e-proceedings can be found at: www.webjunction.org/do/Navigation?category=11842

In addition, the online proceedings from previous VRD Conferences 2002, 2003, and 2004 are also now available on WebJunction at: www.webjunction.org/do/Navigation?category=11822

Materials from the 1999, 2000 and 2001 VRD Conferences will be available on WebJunction in the future.

OCLC/ALISE

2006 Library and Information Science Research Grants Awarded

OCLC Research and the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) have awarded research grants to Lokman Meho with Kiduk Yang (Indiana), Joyce Kanini Mbwesa with Julius Mburi (Nairobi), Jeffrey Pomerantz (North Carolina), and Louise Spiteri (Dalhousie). The OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grants were awarded January 18, during the 2006 ALISE Annual Conference in San Antonio, Texas.

"The university-based research aided by these grants complements the efforts of OCLC to advance librarianship and information science and we are pleased to support it," said Lorcan Dempsey, vice president, Research, and Chief Strategist, OCLC.

Lokman Meho and Kiduk Yang, both Assistant Professors in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, will investigate "Citation analysis of library and information science faculty publications: ISI databases and beyond." Principal Investigator Meho and co-investigator Yang will utilize randomly selected publication lists of full-time faculty members to identify alternative and/or additional sources for locating citations to published works. The investigators will examine citation databases, full-text commercial databases, Internet sources, and subject-specific electronic journals. A federated citation search system prototype will be developed that will automate the complex and time-consuming process of citation identification and analysis from multiple sources.

Joyce Kanini Mbwesa, Lecturer in the Department of Extra Mural Studies at the University of Nairobi, will assess the information needs of distance learners and analyze the library services available to support those needs. Principal Investigator Mbwesa's study is titled "Assessment of library support services for distance learners: a case study of the University of Nairobi, Kenya."

Jeffrey Pomerantz, Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will investigate "The return on investment of collaborative virtual reference service." This study will identify the impact of participating in a collaborative virtual reference service, in terms of the monetary and non-monetary costs and savings incurred by individual libraries and the collective as a whole. The findings will enable more rational economic decision-making by libraries regarding their participation in collaborative virtual reference services.

Louise Spiteri is associate professor in the School of Information Management at Dalhousie University. Her project, "The use of collaborative tagging in public library catalogues," will examine the structure and scope of folksonomies and the extent to which they parallel the norms used in the construction of controlled vocabularies such as Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and the extent to which LCSH headings reflect user-derived folksonomies.

OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant Program: www.oclc.org/research/grants/

SDSC

San Diego Supercomputer Center's Data Central

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has responded to the increasing demand by domain communities by actively collaborating with researchers and national scale projects and by providing the computational and storage infrastructure to keep pace with the growing wealth of information in the sciences. Their systems, allocations, and consulting staff work together to meet the needs of users by integrating computational and data storage resources and by helping researchers to manage, mine, analyze, publish, and share their data.

The data management services they provide include:

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  Data migration and data upload.

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  Portal creation and collection publication.

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  Schema design.

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  SQL query tuning.

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  Database selection.

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  Data analysis and mining.

SDSC hosts a number of both public and private databases and data collections that serve a wide range of scientific domains. These collections represent years of work by collaborating teams of researchers, and they may contain sensor data, visual simulations, libraries of highly refined and analyzed data, or contact information for collaborating scientists, engineers, and students worldwide.

SDSC Data Central: http://datacentral.sdsc.edu/index.html

Emerald

Leads New JISC RSS Project to Push Table of Contents into Library Catalogues

Emerald Group Publishing Limited announces that it is leading a Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) project: Table of Contents by Really Simple Syndication' (TOCRoSS). The project team will develop an RSS news feed service that automatically pushes publisher and e-journal information into library catalogues. Started in October 2005, the project will run for ten months, completing in July 2006.

Emerald, a leading publisher of journals in management, and library and information services, is leading the project. Emerald's 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.

TOCRoSS: Table of Contents by Really Simple Syndication: www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_ tocross

Emerald Group Publishing Ltd: www.emeraldinsight.com/info/about_emerald/News/press/rss_project.jsp