Google Scholar OpenURLs - Firefox Extension
December 1st, 2004Paul from the Distant Librarian (subscribe to his feed folks), posts about a Firefox Extension that uses an OpenURL with Google Scholar. It was created by Peter Binkley at the University of Alberta. Basically, when Google Scholar search is run, the user will be notified if the library subscribes to the journals that come up in the results. Click on the citation and you are brought directly to the article. There are some issues. As Peter says:
“This extension builds an OpenURL using the metadata that it parses out of Google Scholar’s citation. This metadata is limited to the article title, author, journal title, and year of publication. This means you’ll get a journal-level link, filtered by date of publication, rather than an article-level link. It is not always possible to distinguish articles from books in Google Scholar, so some of the OpenURL links will be invalid (e.g. treating the publication information for a book as the title of a journal). No doubt further tweaking could improve this.
But the ultimate solution is to have Google build the OpenURLs. If Google knows the volume and issue numbers and the starting page number, then a proper article-level link could be built. It would also help to have the ISSN. But whatever the metadata, all that is required is for Google to let me register the base url of my institution’s link resolver and some associated info (see below). Google Scholar would then build appropriate OpenURL links to my resolver for all my search results.”
Very interesting. How about trying it on public access terminals in the library? How about marketing this on the library homepage? Baby steps, Steven. I also assume the public terminals have to be running Firefox. Again, most of this stuff is way over my head, but still very interesting the read and watch develop over the course of a few days.
Last, Peter’s explanations for adoption in other libraries seem simple enough. Easy for a non-techie to say, right?