Aside from the minor detail that we haven’t yet got anything that requires user participation, we need to consider how we will facilitate such participation when we do actually have a tool to test! One facet of this will be users at Leeds Met but it would obviously be desirable to engage with users from other institutions, using different repository platforms; after I met Santy at the jiscri event in Manchester, Lisa Rogers from JournalTOCsAPI contacted me last week about engaging with their community of users and suggested I send an email that she can forward to their users to see if they are also interested in our project.
The JournalTOCsAPI project are themselves facilitating user participation in a number of ways and have recently released an alpha of their API at http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/index.php?action=api which, though still with limited functionality, gives a good sense of what queries are/will be supported by the API. At the moment, queries need to be submitted by URL and are returned as an RSS feed. Of course I have been participating as a user and submitted the query http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/api/articles/leeds%20metropolitan%20university which returns 5 articles with “leeds metropolitan university” in the returned metadata (only 5 results!) and includes as much metadata as in the original TOC (table of contents) feed – depending on the quality of this original record this will be:
Abstract, Content type, DOI, Author(s), Journal, ISSN, Article URL, Citation, Publication Date
Question: Is this the full complement of returned fields (these from my 5 results)
For comparison this compares with the metadata we hope to be able to extract from WoS:
- Authors — All authors, book authors, and corporate authors
- Source — Includes the source title, subtitle, book series and subtitle, volume, issue, special issue, pages, article number, supplement number, and publication date
- Keywords — all author supplied keywords
- UT — A unique article identified provided by Thomson Reuters
(Most obviously we are lacking Abstract and DOI)
Like Bibliosight and all the jiscri projects, the JournalTOCsAPI blog is also an important mechanism for facilitating user participation and in a recent post the team asked How do you want to be alerted?; though our primary use cases are perhaps slightly different, this is also a pertinent question for Bibliosight with our original conception having several objectives – to automate the process as much as possible and pull metadata from WoS directly into our repository but also to alert researchers and/or repository administrators to encourage the deposit of an appropriate full text. Of course we also want to produce outputs that are of use to the wider community rather than just to users of intraLibrary.
The third way that JournalTOCsAPI are facilitating user participation is by using an online bug-tracking system called Mantis – http://www.mantisbt.org/. Do we need to think about providing a similar facility for users of Bibliosight deliverables?
Question to JournalTOCsAPI: How successful has this approach been amongst your users? Though I have been set up with an account I must admit that I’ve only logged in once…but then I haven’t yet found a bug to report!
Much to think about as we go into our 3rd project meeting this afternoon and with the focus very much on developing a usable prototype before meeting number 4.
