Course level journal article feed

Following on from the last blog post, I’ve done some coding to see how well (or not!) a course level new journal article feed might work.
The process behind the code is…

  1. for a given course, identify the most frequently accessed journal titles
  2. use JournalTOCs to fetch the latest articles from each journal’s RSS feed
  3. for each course, create a list of articles (sorted in descending date)

…and you can see the initial output from the code here: http://www.daveyp.com/files/stuff/journals/
For some courses (e.g. Educational Administration) it looks like usage is focused on a single journal, but most seem to bring in content from multiple titles — for example, BSc Criminology is bringing in content from:

One of the opportunities here is to use the journal usage data to identify potentially relavant journals that aren’t being used on a course and include those in the feed. In the above example, the Journal of criminal justice might be such a journal.

Quick idea from #jisclms event

A mega quick blog post before the afternoon session kicks off!
Lynn Connaway‘s talk mentioned that they’d found that students wanted the library/librarian to provide a filtered feed of relevant stuff, so here’s our idea…
1) capture OpenURL usage data along with user data (so you know who’s looking at which journals)
2) identify the most popular journals for individual courses
3) for each course, use TicTOCs/JournalTOCs to provide an aggregated feed of new articles for those journal