I'll do my best to clarify the differences between Zetoc and ticTOCs, as best as I understand them:

Zetoc covers about 20,000 journals, including journals that are print-only, or that exist online but do not provide their own RSS feeds

ticTOCs covers about 12,000, limited to journals that provide their own RSS feeds (so this excludes print-only journals in the main)

Zetoc is based the British Library's acquisitions of print issues, with data re-keyed into to system, which means that it may be a few weeks between an issue being published an appearing in Zetoc.

ticTOCs uses feeds from the publishers (or their online hosts), so they are as up to date as the publisher wants to make them. Sometimes ticTOCs offers the latest issue feed and the 'articles in press feed', if that is what the publishers offer.

Zetoc only contains tables of contents

ticTOCs contains whatever the publisher chooses to include in its feed, which may include abstracts, subject terms, DOIs, and graphical abstracts (especially for chemistry titles)

Zetoc is hosted at MIMAS

ticTOCs is hosted at MIMAS

Zetoc provides email alerts of RSS feeds

ticTOCs provides RSS feeds only (but it's getting much easier to get your feeds into your email client if that's the way you want to work, right?)

So to summarise, Zetoc covers more journals, but ticTOCs should be more up to date and contains richer content.


Terry



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






-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dr R. Sanderson
Sent: 12 February 2009 10:04
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] ticTOCs makes its data available to developers

How does this compare to Zetoc at Mimas, which also provides RSS feeds 
for journal ToCs?

Rob

On Thu, 12 Feb 2009, Boheemen, Peter van wrote:

> This is great !!! But don't forget the API !
>
> Peter
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Bucknell, Terry
> Sent: woensdag 11 februari 2009 23:12
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] ticTOCs makes its data available to developers
>
> 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-prett
> y-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.
>
>
> Share and enjoy.
>
>
>
> 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
>