Simon Hodson, ticTOCs and Gold Dust (NGE2 Conf, 29-30 April 08)
Session covering RSS feeds, the information overload and the 21st century researcher.
Growth of RSS feeds has meant a rather confusing picture for users with multiple feeds and icons.
ticTOCs:
Deal with tables of contents alerts. It is a Project to develop a freely available current awareness service making easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and resuse scholarly journal tables of contents.
TOCs by email - some users find alerts are a form of self-inflicted spam.
These are some of the challenges that lie in the path of academics wanting to take advantage of the info available thru RSS feeds.
ticTOC aims to provide solutions to these challenges:
- huge database of RSS TOC feeds
- search by key words in journal title and in RSS metadata
- TICK to save journal to\My TOCs
- Link thru to full text
- export feeds to other readers
- export bibliographic management services
Gold Dust
- seeks to innovatory solutions to the problem of info overload. aware of the challenges posed by information overload.
- availability does not mean accessibility.
- availability does not mean significance or usefulness
Commentators are observing that alerting systems are actually contributing to info oveload (email alerts, RSS feeds)
Gold Dust will research technologies which might provide:
- efficient ways of keeping users informed of current info
- while intelligently mitigating the danger of info overload
Principles of Gold Dust:
- aggregation of new content
- efffortless discovery of relevant materials
- delivery via service of users’s choice
Both projects aim to:
- enable the academic communities to take advantage of RSS
- balance the challenges of current awareness with dangers of info overload
Questions:
Q: Any expectation of how much usage data required before Gold Dust starts to filter through RSS feeds?
A: Takes key words and hunts for them which is the finding aspect but there is also filtering out aspect. Not just filtering in and out, trying to find models of information.
Comment: Might need various filters?
Q: any plans for how it would link to other researchers?
A: not in this project but is a good idea. if successful one step towards using intelligently created scholarly profiles.
Comment: use as a collaborative tool - if you form a research group - go through a gateway could then see what each of the group are being alerted on.
Comment: I currently rely on social networks to do filtering for me
Q: what does ticTOC do that zeTOC (?) doesn’t? Is it federated?
A: the federation is an issue, no real answer at the moment. aware that users will click through to the full article and find the institution doesn’t subscribe. re. zeTOC: ticTOC aims to be current awareness, latest issue, about keeping uptodate rather than trawling through whole database of past issues.
Q: any users expressed concern about identity security?
A: no-one has as yet. is something that have spoken to Web2Rights to be sure.
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