DIY Librarian

As a postscript to my post about gray and scholarly literature, I give you Eric Schnell’s manuscript saga. I feel like every time I turn around, I see another sign telling me to forget about traditional journal publication for the moment and focus my efforts elsewhere.

That said, I have resolved to try to start reading more traditional journals, so that at the very least I can talk more knowledgeably about them. It’s something I keep meaning to do but haven’t been very good at since I got my degree.

Roddy MacLeod provides an update on (and a little peek into the future of) RSS in the latest FreePint Newsletter. MacLeod is, among other things, involved in the ticTOCs journal table of contents project. He envisions a day when we no longer have to explain “What is RSS?” because subscribing to a feed has become seamless.

I think a lot of new technologies follow a similar path. They come out, a few techie types embrace them, and then if they start to catch on, the technology becomes more or less invisible. Think of HTML. I remember taking classes on HTML, and we’d painstakingly hand-code simple pages showing our resumes or photos of our pets. Today, those kinds of pages can be created using point-and-click interfaces with little or no knowledge of HTML. Of course, the code is still there, underneath it all (and I’m glad I know it), but most users don’t need to think about it.

One of our most time-consuming services at my library is collecting and aggregating journal tables of contents for our faculty, so they don’t have to subscribe to individual feeds or email alerts. If ticTOCs accomplishes its mission, we could simply direct them to that site and they could set up one feed with all of the tables of contents, and we could focus on other things (like finding money to continue subscribing to the journals so they can actually read the articles).