Taylor and Francis: SARA TOC alerting

In the past year or so Kerim and I have published articles in Anthropology News about ‘next generation’ research online — using RSS feeds and so forth. In the next week or so I thought it might be interesting to try to undertake a broad review of what sort of tools are out there for anthropologists who do research. I actually am not qualified for this since I am not a librarian, and so this won’t be an enormous list of 500 URLs. Instead I just want to share some of the things that I think are useful as a researcher — the sorts of tricks and tips and locations that I find useful to know about.

For instance: how can you keep on top of what’s being published? Most journals have some sort of alerting service although it is typically in the form of ‘TOC (table of contents) alerting’ rather than an RSS feed — you give the journal your email, and when a new issue comes out you get a list of all the articles in your inbox. You don’t have to have a subscription to the journal or right to read it online in order to get alerted — it’s basically a fancy form of advertising.

Now there are various middleware services and sites that attempt to aggregate these sorts of services for you but on the whole I’ve found them to be spotty in coverage and they never provide the one-stop shopping oslution I want (if someone has other experiences let me know) so I’ve decided to just go direct to the source. Since each company has a different method of providing you TOC alerting, it makes sense to compare OTC alerting services by publisher rather than by journal.

I’ll start with “Taylor and Francis”:http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/default.asp. While you may not know Taylor and Francis’s name, you are probably familiar with one of its subsidiaries: Routledge. Their “social science”:http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/subcategory.asp?category=SS000000 journals are not relatively well known to some, but as an Oceanist and fellow traveler with my Australian colleagues Taylor and Francis publishes a number of journals I want to keep in touch with: The Journal of Pacific History, History and Anthropology, Identities, Anthropological Forum, Ethnos, and The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (formerly Canberra Anthropology). You can see “the whole list of anthropology journals”:http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journals.asp?subcategory=SS020000 here.

So how can you keep in touch with Taylor and Francis? They offer two services — “eUpdates” (their free newsletter) and two TOC alerting services: ‘S@RA’ and ‘OPAL.’ Opal is described as their ‘behavioral sciences’ alerting service, but apparently this just means psychology and those of us who actually observe human behavior in the field have to use SARA. The homepage is “here”:http://www.tandf.co.uk/sara/ and you can register for the service “here”:http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?target=alerting.

The first problem with SARA that I found was that Taylor and Francis made it too difficult to locate the service, figure out how it wasn’t OPAL or eUpdates, and to register for it — the ‘how to register’ page, for instance, instructs you to go back in your browser and click on the image on the previous page that says “SARA” in big letters and ‘register’ in much smaller ones. And this is the same page that says in large letters in the bottom “LIBRARIANS — REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE NEWSLETTER.” Since the ‘how to register’ page contains no real information, would it have killed them have a link in the sidebar (or in the body of the article!) that said in large clear letters “Click here to register” and other other which said “click here to register if you are a librarian”? It’s this sort of usability stuff that makes sites like this needlessly hard to use. Now, I recognize that I am hopelessly critical about usability, but remember this site is supposed to cater to scholars who are not particularly savvy about this stuff — it shold be as easy to use as possible. But at any rate this is just a minor quibble, not a deal-breaker when it comes to getting this service to work.

The sign-up process itself is innocuous and Taylor and Francis do a good job of letting you sign up for a variety of different journals. Even better, once you are logged in you can browse through journals and if you see one that you want to receive TOC alerting for, you just click a button on the right-hand side bar. If you want to unsubscribe from it. Taylor and Francis never seems to be confused by the fact that my rights to view their content come through my university, but that my personalized account is my own, which is very gratifying.

Managing your account is a pain though. There isn’t a clear login/logoff option hovering at the edge of the page so if you don’t store cookies in your browser like I do it takes a bit to get to the point where you can log back on to the system. There is an option to receive text-only email alerts, which is good. But, tragically, when you go to ‘your account’ there is no way to see and manage the journals you have added to your alert list, or at least none that I could figure out without doing quite a lot of searching.

In sum, Taylor and Francis’s TOC alerting service does a good job letting you sign up for journals once you figure out what service you’re supposed to be using. However, it does a lousy job of letting you manage your subscriptions or even telling you what you’ve already signed up for. While I have yet to receive an email from the news service, I must say that the quality of user support on their website leaves me unimpressed. While the site is not terribly done, there are numerous things about it that would have been easy to implement and would have enormously improved scholars’ ability to learn more about Tayor and Francis publications.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

3 thoughts on “Taylor and Francis: SARA TOC alerting

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