[Web4lib] Adding/building permalinks to full-text articles

[Jonathan Rochkind]

I don't entirely understand what you're doing, but if all they need to 
do is take a URL they already know or have found, and prepend the proxy 
string, then one possibility is making a 'bookmarklet' that prepends the 
string for them. That is, generally, some javascript code you have them 
bookmark. Such a thing will work in any browser. They go look at the URL 
they want, they click the bookmarklet, it prepends the string for them.
An example, from where I used to go to school, used for proxy-fying a 
URL for other purposes, is here:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/help/proxyTools.html

Another much trickier possibility, if you can customize your link 
resolver, would be to add this to your link resolver menu. I thought of 
this reading your suggestion for db vendors. Most dbs will already give 
your users a link to your link resolver for every article. What if the 
link resolver menu then gave the user the "perma-link"? You'd have to be 
able to customize your link resolver screen (with SFX this could easily 
be done)--but it's tricky beyond that too (how does the link resolver 
know what URL to proxy-fy? The referer url?  Not quite. Hmm.) So not 
sure if it could be done, and it would take some in-house skill to pull 
off, but if you could this seems an even better solution to me. Then you 
just tell your users to click on the link resolver icon they are 
probably already familiar with, and it'll give them the perma-link there.

(I'm curious, is proxy-fying the url all you are doing to make it into a 
'permalink'? What about vendors whose URLs just aren't going to work as 
permalinks, regardless of proxy-fying them?)

Jonathan

Jon Ritterbush wrote:
> Happy new year, everyone...  Over the past couple weeks, our library has
> been working on a project to help faculty members generate and embed
> permanent links, or permalinks, to full-text articles from our subscription
> databases.  The problem here and at my previous place of work has been
> explaining how to prefix a proxy string to the front of these article-level
> URLs (e.g.
> http://eres.regent.edu:2048/login?url=http://somedatabase.com/yadayada...)
>  
> Has anyone out there developed a better mousetrap to allow users to generate
> these kinds of permalinks WITH a proxy string?
>  
> TO ANY DATABASE VENDORS: one idea might be to enable individual libraries to
> embed these proxy prefixes to article-level links.  For example, a library
> administrator could insert the prefix http://proxy.library.edu... into some
> field in a database admin site.  This prefix would then be appended to any
> permalinks displayed or accessible from the database result screens.   
>  
> I think EBSCO and ProQuest already make a permalink available to users, they
> just lack the proxy prefix for off-campus access by authenticated users.
> Librarians who administer their Serials Solutions setup will understand what
> I'm talking about here, since SerSol already does this...
>  
> Thanks for any feedback or other suggestions!
>  
> Jon
>  
>
> ___________________________________________________________
> Jon Ritterbush, MLS           Voice: 757-226-2985                 
> Reference Librarian           Fax:  757-226-4167
> Regent University             Email: jritterbush at regent.edu
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-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu