Today I tried to deal with three email alerts for BIT papers – two for new journal issues (Oct and Nov 2013) and one with some newly received papers. I had previously inspected the papers on my iPhone – a practice which I’m getting used to and finding quite feasible and effective. This despite the back arrows on the Taylor & Francis App no longer working reliably, requiring me to exit the App and re-enter to move to another paper – I shall have to seek advice from the T&F Help Desk for that. When I read a paper on the iPhone, if I decide I want to include it in my filing index, I mark it as a favourite in the App with a view to updating my index when I’m sitting at my PC.  So, today, going through the emails, I was checking the paper titles in the emails against the papers I’d marked as favourites in the iPhone, and I encountered two significant problems:

a)      For one of the papers I had mistakenly made two provisional entries in my index – I must have received two alerts for it at different stages in the acceptance process and when I received the second alert I hadn’t realised that there was already a provisional entry in my index for it. For this to have happened I must have failed to check for an entry in the Favourites section of the App – or maybe I had forgotten to put an entry in the Favourites section when I first saw the paper. This problem is due to the disconnect between the information sent in the emails and the information provided in the iPhone App. Ideally, I’d like to be able to include some information with each paper as it enters the acceptance process – and for that information to be shown presented every time I receive an email about the paper or when I look at the paper in the iPhone App.

b)      I’m finding it very difficult to match the papers in the emails to my index entries. This is because I haven’t been putting the exact title of the paper in the index – my practice up to now has been to put whatever text I want in the index to describe the item concerned. I’ve decided that in future I’m going to have to include the exact title otherwise the whole process is going to be too difficult and time consuming.

These two problems are symptomatic of the two systems (mine and the T&F alerting and App systems) having been designed independently and consequently being highly incompatible with one another. Of course, other users of the T&F system almost certainly operate in different ways and therefore the T&F system is likely to be incompable with many other personal systems. I contend that the best way to address this discrepancy would be to include some general purpose capability that can be moulded in different ways by different users. One such general purpose capability might be to enable each user to attach some personal annotations to each paper and for that private annotation to be presented each time the user sees the title or contents of the paper – regardless whether that is in an email or in the App. Of course there’s no guarantee that such a  solution would work for everyone – or in fact for anyone other than myself. The only way to be sure would be to investigate what all or some real users actually do. I wonder to what extent T&F performed  such a study.

Having completed the exercise of going through the two new issues of the journal, getting my index up to date, downloading copies of the papers for which I’ve made an entry in my index, deleting entries in the ‘Latest’ section of the App, etc., I feel a little exhausted. It was not a quick or pleasant experience – especially when having to deal with two new issues all at once. Overall, the switch from a paper version of BIT to an electronic version is, so far, taking up a lot more of my time and involving me in a lot of extra nugatory work.

Yesterday I finally got the Taylor & Francis App working on my iPhone after being advised I needed to delete all the history and the cookies in my iPhone browser. It looks as though it could be very useful as it will very quickly display the full text of all the latest articles that are published on the main website prior to final versions being produced and included in the Journal proper. Therefore, I will be alerted to new articles by email (which I can pick up on the iPhone) and should be able to quickly scan through them on the iPhone to see if they are of interest. For papers that I’m interested in, I make an entry in my filing index, so there will be a disconnect at that point when I will have to revert to the laptop. However, the ease of access to the papers and the easy-to-use facilities available to navigate through them, promise to make the whole business of initial scanning/reading of the paper a much quicker and easier process.

Another major issue I’ve had is to distinguish between papers I have already looked at and those I haven’t, when the email alerts come in. This is because the papers go through several stages before being included in the journal proper – and as they progress through each stage they are included in alert messages. The iPhone App may resolve this problem because it separates papers into two categories – Latest Articles and Accepted Author Versions. I’m hoping that I can restrict my viewing to just the Latest Articles section – though I’m not really clear on what is included under that heading – I need to try it out a little bit and will provide a further report when I’ve done so.

The advert for my collection of BIT journals went in the July edition of The Ergonomist and read as follows: “If you’d like to own the entire set of Behaviour & Information Technology Journal from Volume 1 (1982) – Volume 31 (2012) this is your chance. The collection is free to any individual or organisation that would like to give them a home. If you’re interested contact Paul Wilson at pwilsonofc@btinternet.com or phone on 01296-488-066”. However, it failed to produce any responses, so I finally asked the Aylesbury Reference Library if they might be interested. They weren’t – but gave me the phone number of the new Buckingham University Technical College based on the Aylesbury College campus on Oxford Road and opening this month. I duly phoned and was put in touch with Toby Payne, Head of Science, who was keen to have them. I delivered them earlier today – but discovered in the course of packing them that the following issues were missing in the otherwise complete collection from inception of the journal in 1982 to the end of 2012:

• 1984, Vol 3, Numbers 3 and 4
• 1985, Vol 5, Number 3
• 1990, Vol 9, Number 3

I’m hoping the missing issues might be in one of the four boxes of papers I have yet to scan, and, if I do so, I’ll take them along to Toby to complete the set.

Ironically, after I got home from delivering the journals, I found an email from an Institute of Ergonomics member in Nigeria asking if they could have the journals…. an extraordinary coincidence!

My conclusion from all this is that demand for hardcopy journals is probably reducing substantially – but there are still some people out there who can find a use for them.

Over the last few days, I’ve been conducting an email correspondence with Taylor & Francis (T&F) about their iPhone and Tablet App.  The App seems to be primarily to enable people to search for, and save, selected papers to their mobile device and to be able to read them offline. T&F’s Alerting functionality is not included in the App. The App is activated by using a code to pair it with one’s username on the main T&F website, however, I’m having problems doing that – the App won’t accept the code I’ve been provided with. In the course of speaking to the Help Desk to resolve this issue, I’ve also started a conversation with the App’s development team who are apparently keen to hear about user requirements and behaviours. I’ll report on the App’s capabilities, and on what its like to read a paper on the iPhone, once I get my device pairing problem sorted.