As you may know, ticTOCs is a project funded by JISC in the UK to create a single, freely available source of RSS feeds for tables of contents - see http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/ . Our database now contains over 12,000 journals from over 430 publishers. Up until now the only way to get feeds out of ticTOCs has been to use our web interface to search for feeds and then export them as an OPML file, or one at a time to a feed reader of your choice.

We are working on creating APIs to let groups like the code4lib community extract our data in more flexible ways, but it has been pointed out to us - see http://robotlibrarian.billdueber.com/tictocs-give-us-a-file-pretty-pretty-pretty-please/ - that all you really need (at least at first) is a simple tab-delimited file that contains titles, ISSNs, and feed URIs for all of the journals in tocTOCs. We now provide precisely this at http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/text.php.

We hope that you will use this data to populate your catalog, A-Z journals list or whatever with RSS feed icons/links, or embedded TOCs.  We look forward to the day when SFX, SerialsSolutions and the like are all using our data!

Although the project phase of ticTOCs is very nearly at end end, we are confident that we are very close to ensuring that the future of ticTOCs is assured for at least the next three years, and will continue to be free.


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Terry Bucknell
Electronic Resources Manager
Sydney Jones Library
University of Liverpool
Chatham St, PO Box 123
Liverpool, L69 3DA, UK
Tel: +44 (0)151 794 2692
Fax: +44 (0)151 794 2681