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.

Yesterday I completed the process of ensuring that I have electronic copies of all the papers for which I have made an entry in my index, and set about trying to find a home for my hardcopy collection. I first emailed a colleague to give him first refusal, but he already has access to a set. So I sent in a small advert for The Ergonomist – the monthly magazine issued by the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors. I’ll have to wait and see if anyone still wants hardcopy now that electronic documents and communication are firmly established in the world at large.

I’ve just been catching up on three weeks of BIT Alert emails (3 new volumes and four new paper online alerts) which I haven’t been able to deal with due to other priorities. I’ve found it hard work to deal with the whole volumes – particularly those which include several papers I’m interested in and need to read and digest; and which had been received prior to  me getting Alerts. My rather obvious conclusion is that I would far rather receive the Alerts prior to publication so that dealing with a whole volume is essentially just a checking affair to match up the papers with what I had already dealt with via the Alerts. Having said that if there are several papers that I’m interested in in a single Alert the effect is just the same – its hard work going through several papers in a single session. As with most things, its easier to do things as they occur rather than dealing with a backlog. So I would prefer an Alert to be about a single paper and for it to be sent out immediately it is available for issue, rather than accumulating a number of papers for inclusion in a single Alert message. Having said that there are probably some people who would prefer to work the other way. Perhaps users should be given the option to choose their preferred way of working.