Ok, right up front, the dummy is me. It might be you too, but I’m only talking about me here.
Earlier this year, David, our Integrated Systems Manager, put together a U of Calgary beta version of LibX, a Firefox Extension for Libraries. LibX does all sorts of neat things, but I was finding it a little clunky in my toolbar area, so wasn’t in love with it. David suggested I could not display the toolbar (just uncheck it from the View/Toolbars area) and I’d still get all the goodness of things like right-click context menus and dynamically-generated links (all ISBNs are hyperlinked, special visual cues on Amazon.com and Google Scholar, and stuff like that). It’s a pretty nifty extension, and if you know the right values for your catalogue and open-URL resolver, apparently not terribly difficult to build.
Ok, so that’s all fine and dandy and useful, but a couple of weeks ago I was listening to Jon Udell’s interview with Tony Hammond about digital object identifiers, and I so wanted to fully understand them (DOIs). I thought I was close, but I couldn’t figure out how they were useful in my world of creating persistent links for faculty (or teaching them how to do it for themselves). I thought "maybe adding our EZProxy prefix to a DOI would do something" but EZProxy seems to want URLs, not DOIs. I saw DOIs on many citations, but wasn’t figuring out how I could use them.
Then yesterday a blog post I read included a DOI and I noticed it was hyperlinked thusly: http://sfx.exlibrisgroup.com:9003/calgary?id=doi:10.1038/445567a&sid=libx:ucalgary and of course it was LibX that stuck in the SFX prefix. The sid bit on the end isn’t even necessary, all that’s needed is http://sfx.exlibrisgroup.com:9003/calgary?id=doi:10.1038/445567a and bingo, SFX provides a link to our copy of that article! Of course!!! SFX is what knows about our local holdings!
So now I’m on a crusade to introduce LibX to our faculty, and show them how easy it is to build a persistent URL using SFX and DOIs. This comes at a great time, as in two weeks I’m co-presenting at our Teaching and Learning Centre on the topic of building persistent links. If I can get away w/o having to actually explain what a DOI is, this could be great.
Comments
3 Responses to “LibX – DOI for Dummies”
We’ve also been working on getting faculty to build a persistent links using Open URL’s and one solution we came up with is to create a tool for Blackboard and which converts bibliographic information entered by Faculty into a form into a persistent open URL automatically. e.g.
Hennecke (2001) ‘T Cell Receptor-MHC Interactions’ Cell 104 (1), pp.1 – 4
becomes
http://ezproxy.liv.ac.uk:2048/login?url=http://openurl.liv.ac.uk:8888/lfp/LinkFinderPlus/Display?atitle=T Cell Receptor-MHC Interactions&aulast=Hennecke&title=Cell&volume=104&issue=1&date=2001&artnum=&spage=1&epage=4&issn=0092-8674&_litType=Journal
The advantage of this approach is that they don’t have to know anything about constructing URL’s.
If you wanted to build a persistent link using EzProxy and doi’s you could specify the doi resolver in the URL
http://ezproxy.liv.ac.uk:2048/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/445567a
Ahh, it’s so much fun to learn and expose one’s inadequacies in an open environment like this 🙂 Thanks David, that does indeed work just fine with EZProxy – will have to take that into consideration as I determine how best to proceed. Very interested in your Bb tool – is there any way you can share that? Will it show up on the Bb site as a building block? Have you given any consideration to shortening that resulting URL somehow? I’ve found faculty to get pretty leery around such long URLs; they seem to always figure out a way to break them across multiple lines :-/ One of our programmers built something similar a while back – I’ll have to go back and look at it again…
that sid off the end of the LibX generated URL is quite useful for your SFX stats, letting you know LibX is sending users to your SFX service…