Google Scholar OpenURLs – Firefox Extension

Ahh, the Alberta Advantage!  🙂  Peter Binkley up the road at the University of Alberta has taken my original idea and run long and far with it.  Programming his first Firefox extension, Peter has built a proof-of-concept OpenURL extension for Google Scholar.  Basically if you have this extension installed in your version of Firefox, anytime you visit Schoogle the U of Alberta SFX options appear for content they own.  Obviously you’ll want to edit the extension to point to your own link resolver, which is where I’m getting bogged down.  It’s geeky, but I’m sure in about 15 minutes someone will come up with a better way to configure it and we’ll be off to the races again.

Peter writes,

"The purpose is to enable users at an institution that has an OpenURL
link-resolver to use that resolver to locate the full text of articles
found in Google Scholar, instead of relying on the links to publishers’
websites provided by Google. This is important because it solves the
"appropriate copy problem": the link to a publisher’s site is useless
if you don’t have a subscription that lets you into that site, and your
library may provide access to the same article in an aggregator’s
package or elsewhere. In the example in the screenshot, for example,
our link-resolver will give the same link into Blackwell-Synergy but
also a link to the same article in Academic Search Premier. If we
didn’t subscribe to Blackwell-Synergy, the OpenURL link is the user’s
only lifeline to full text. 

The best division of labour, therefore, is to let Google Scholar help
you find a citation, and let your local link-resolver get you from
there to the full text."

This also takes care of the marketing idea from my initial post, though in the case of the U of C we’ve just gone with the generic SFX button (
) so maybe it’s time to revisit that, or to point to another graphic for this type of use…

Nice work Peter!