[WEB4LIB] Google Scholar, Firefox, and OpenURLs

[Eric Hellman]

Peter Binkley's "proof-of-concept" got us pretty excited about 
Firefox and the possibilities of using plug-ins to put OpenURL's 
EVERYWHERE they belong - including Google Scholar.

One of our engineers, Tom Ventimiglia, has spent a fair amount of 
time working on what Peter started to see how far it would go.

Tom has added
1. NISO OpenURL 1.0 support. OpenURL 1.0 lets you do some really 
interesting things such as put the "referring entity" and "referent" 
url's into the openURL.

2. Integration of DOIs and PMIDs into OpenURLs. This results in real 
usability of the resulting OpenURL's when you're doing research such 
as in the biomedical area. This pulls information from all links 
provided by Google, not just the first one.

3. An "Options" window for entering library-specific configuration 
(linkserver url, link text, image, openurl version).

4. Profiles to allow users to quickly change the tool's configuration.

5. Automatic updates via Firefox's update service. We thought this 
was very important since you never know what google is going to do 
with their html.

"OpenURL Referrer" is available at http://www.openly.com/openurlref/ 
It can be used with OpenURL 0.1 or 1.0 linkservers such as 1Cate, 
SFX, Sirsi Resolver, LinkFinderPlus, LinkSource, OLink, LinkSolver, 
OL2, Swetswise Linker, ArticleLinker, etc.

It's free; full source and data are available under the Mozilla 
"Tri-license" (MPL+GPL+LGPL).

The interesting thing looking forward is not so much that this works 
for Google Scholar (which has to be considered promising but 
incomplete at this stage), but that it could work pretty well for 
some of information services that haven't "gotten it" yet.

Eric



At 11:53 AM -0800 11/30/04, Binkley, Peter wrote:
>As a proof-of-concept I've built a Firefox extension that adds OpenURL links
>to the results lists in Google Scholar. It can be downloaded here:
>http://www.ualberta.ca/~pbinkley/gso/ . The functionality is pretty basic
>but it shows what might be possible.
>
>Ideally, Google will build this functionality directly into Google Scholar,
>and we'll be able to integrate Google Scholar fully with our local access
>systems. In the meantime, this extension is fun to play with. It is by no
>means perfect, but it is perhaps a taste of what we have to look forward to.
>
>You'll need the latest version of Firefox to use it (1.0, not the 1.0
>preview).
>
>Peter
>
>Peter Binkley
>Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian
>Information Technology Services
>4-30 Cameron Library
>University of Alberta Libraries
>Edmonton, Alberta
>Canada T6G 2J8
>Phone: (780) 492-3743
>Fax: (780) 492-9243
>e-mail: peter.binkley at ualberta.ca


-- 

Eric Hellman, President                            Openly Informatics, Inc.
eric at openly.com                                    2 Broad St., 2nd Floor
tel 1-973-509-7800 fax 1-734-468-6216              Bloomfield, NJ 07003
http://www.openly.com/1cate/      1 Click Access To Everything