journals and wikis

Jump to Comments

There are many, many academic journals, books and other resources and many, many readers, subscribers, libraries…

So RSS has got to be a significant tool for publishers wanting to get regular updates out to info-swamped librarians, readers, authors … hence projects such as ToCross and Ingenta’s work with Grazr I guess.

But the journal feeds that I’ve found are usually just tables of contents. What if they were to include price changes, news about late issues, new features, publisher news, closing titles, titles changing publishers? I reckon it would be useful to have an alerting service for stuff like this – all in one place.

So, how about a big journal wiki?

One place to publish, update and search for bibliographic info, publisher news, latest tables of contents etc. The publisher would ‘own’ the pages for their publications, so they would add and update the information. The subscriber would have one place to go to find that information and selectively watch for changes by subscribing to relevant feeds.

WHAT GOES IN:

Journal bibliographic info – all that standard stuff about volume, issues, ISSNs, prices, ownership…

Tables of Contents using TOC email alerts or rss feeds if they exist, using something like Grazr to bring them into the wiki.

WHAT COMES OUT:

A golden copy of publisher and journal biblio information (pages, prices, titles, ownership) – one place to search, discover and monitor.

Central source of rss feeds of tables of contents, journal news, vendor news, title change, prices, late publication news… in one format.

Watchlists to keep an eye on specific groups of publications ~ such as the journals your institution subscribes to, or the titles you read on a regular basis or you’re thinking of buying next year.

Maybe this would be a place to put some widgets?

Could this work?

1 Comment

Filed under rss, wiki