[Web4lib] Proxifier bookmarklet -- too risky?

[Ross Singer]

Keith,

There is nothing foolhardy about this.  I think your uphill battle will be
getting people to know about the bookmarklet, installing it and knowing when
and how to use it.

Also their disappointment in learning that the bookmarklet doesn't work on
their emailed TOC/current awareness feeds in their email client (unless they
use webmail).

Also, I'm not sure how your proxy is set up, but if it gives an error for
links that aren't in the config, it could seem a little user-unfriendly.

WAG the Dog does something very similar to this, but uses the EZProxy web
service interface to determine beforehand which links should be proxied.

http://www.library.gatech.edu/research_help/web_localizer.html

We haven't had any problems.

-Ross.

On 8/9/06, Keith D. Engwall <kengwall at catawba.edu> wrote:
>
> I'm running into the notion of "Just because you *can* do it doesn't
> mean you *should* do it", and I'd like to solicit some advice from the
> community.
>
> The faculty on our campus are starting to use persistent links from
> research resources (EBSCOhost, etc.) to link to full-text articles.  One
> of the challenges they've run into is that these links are *directly* to
> the resource, and do not go through the library proxy server.  Thus,
> when they are working from home, these persistent links do not work.
>
> I've figured out how to create a "Proxifier" bookmarklet that will allow
> them to enter the URL for the persistent link (or any URL), and it will
> prepend the proxy part of the URL and take them to the resource through
> the proxy.
>
> Now, our proxy (EZProxy) is set up to only work with specific URLs, so I
> *think* this is safe, but there's a nagging voice at the back of my
> brain that isn't so sure.
>
> Any thoughts, opinions?  Is this foolhardy?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Keith
>
> ---------------------------------
> Keith Engwall
> Head of Library Systems and Technology
> Catawba College
> Salisbury, NC
> kengwall at catawba.edu
>
> "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
> relations, for nature cannot be fooled." - Richard P. Feynman
>
>
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