Table of Contents Service
I am in the process of evaluating the services our library provides. One service we provide is a table of contents alert service. Hospital employees (doctors, nurses, administrators) let us know which journals they would like the table of contents delivered to them. As the most recent journal comes to the library we copy the table of contents and mail it to the requestors. People then circle the articles they would like and return it back to the library. We then copy and deliver the requested article.
We have a booming TOC service. We copy more than 250 table of contents for various people. Now, some people request to receive the table of contents from many different journals, but that is still a big number for my little ol' library.
I have been thinking. There has got to be a better way of providing this service so that they can get the TOC delivered to them quicker and receive the requested articles faster. I have begun to look at delivering the table of contents electronically for some journals.
What I would like to do is sign people up to receive the TOC's (from journals we have electronically) via email. That way the person can quickly read the table of contents then click and download the article, instead of waiting a couple of days to for mail delivery and for us to copy the article.
I am wondering what other libraries do for their table of content services. What obstacles have they encountered? What about offsite physicians who can't access the electronic version because their home/office computer is not a part of the hospital IP range? What about journals we get through aggregators such as MDConsult and Ovid, are there reliable methods to get online table of contents from them?
2 Comments:
I hope you get lots of feedback - I know it's been discussed quite a few times, and I've never heard of a perfect solution. We subscribe to the feed from the journal (eg BMJ), then have a rule in our mailbox that recognizes it, and automatically forwards it to our client, with a "This is from your Wonderful Library" cover. This works - mostly. You need to keep a good list of who wants what, and revise it annually.
We would love to use Ovid for this, but they're too slow getting the content, and the format is the same as for their searches - compare the TOC for NEJM by Ovid and from the journal. Particularly if clients are used to getting paper copies, we've found them resistant to the Ovid option.
Of course, more and more are available by RSS (cf BMJ publishing), but our users aren't (yet) great feed readers.
When all journals make use of RSS, I think that writing an application that will parse the feeds and distribute their content by pre-set parameters (and send along links useful to local users) will be feasible. Until then, a service or applicaiton to do this would require a good deal of human intervention.
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