Ross Singer – digital alchemist.
OK admittedly it will be a loooong time before all our distance students will be using Firefox, but wow is this cool! This is the sort of thing that when shown in a training session would likely entice someone to switch to Firefox. To summarize, once you’ve (painlessly) installed Greasemonkey and WAG the Monkey (one time only), every time you visit any page anywhere, if there’s a link to a database or resource that your school has, you will also see a link to your school’s resource (actually it appears the link is completely rewritten to point to your resource). Really. So when I visit your library in my browser, or when I visit Google Scholar, right next to every relevant link is a new link (and/or icon) that points back to the UofC version of that database or resource. That’s localization baby!
Oh I forgot, actually there is a slightly painful initial process where you (the library) have to install WAG the Dog on a server to enable all this, but I’m led to believe this is pretty straightforward for someone who knows servers. Still working on it here, not because it’s hard, but because I have to keep tracking down the right people to talk to.
Link: Dilettante’s Ball: WAG the Monkey.
Here are a couple screenshots of what you’ll see. Obviously once it’s installed at your school the link icon would look like whatever you wanted it to… (click for larger versions)
U of Toronto database page:
U of Toronto database page with WAG the Monkey turned on: (See the little "P"? Each of those links has been rewritten to point at Georgia Tech’s version of the database)