The Spoken Word Matters blog yesterday pointed to the University of Liverpool library webpages, which is advising students of the benefits of subscribing to rss feeds of table of contents of their favourite journals (see page). They also provide information on installing an rss reader and a list of journals that currently have rss feeds. This is very similar in to the JISC-funded TOCRoSS project that I discussed last week (see post), however, in this instance the library itself does not appear to have been involved in the development of the feeds, simply the sourcing of those which are available and the promotion of the benefits of these to students. This will no doubt become increasingly useful as more and more ejournals distribute their ToCs by RSS. Currently I have only found one ‘academic’ publication (i.e. those expensive peer-reviewed ones!!) to which I have access that allows RSS feeds (the Journal of Information Science) and a couple of other electronic-only publications such as Ariadne and D-Lib magazine. I’m sure, however, that eventually, organisations such as Emerald etc. will develop RSS feeds as part of their subscription service for all their publications (eventually!). In the meantime, I think that the way in which the University of Liverpool is utlising the facilities that are already on offer and promoting them to students in this way is a really effective (and cost-effective!) method of increasing the usability and accessibility of their electronic collection.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,