All posts by inga

resources

Usage of OvidSP in the MPG: Login failed?

Two weeks ago, we noticed a nasty problem with the AutoAlert emails created by OvidSP for the database "Current Contents". Last Friday we posted following announcement on the MPG entry page for the Ovid Database Server:

Dear users of the Ovid AutoAlert feature,

Due to technical problems on Ovid’s side you may be experiencing that you cannot login to the OvidSP server when following a link provided by your AutoAlert email. This problem can be solved manually by changing the host address of the link provided, i.e. by switching from

http://ovidsp.ovid.com/ovidweb.cgi?T=JS&MODE=ovid&PAGE=titles&NEWS=n&D=ccall&AUTOALERT=[…]

to

http://ovid.gwdg.de/ovid-bin/login.cgi?T=JS&MODE=ovid&PAGE=titles&NEWS=n&D=ccall&AUTOALERT=[…]

Please feel free to contact Alexander Struck (Ovid) or Inga Overkamp (MPDL) if you are facing difficulties. We would like to apologize for any inconvenience.

This Friday, we are happy to announce that Ovid’s support staff managed to restore the appropriate proxy setting, thus any upcoming email should contain links which can be resolved successfully by users in the Max Planck Society.

Case closed? Not really, because this particular problem was just one indicator of circumstances specific to the Max Planck Society: Neither MPG IP ranges nor personal user accounts are registered on the online OvidSP server itself. Instead, the MPG maintains a local login page which checks the credentials provided by a user (IP address or personal login) and redirects the request to OvidSP if the authentication succeeded. Keeping the login procedure local reduces the administrative effort immensely, but as drawback users from the MPG are not able to login via the "official" OvidSP homepage. This is fine in most cases because all MPG sites point to http://ovid.gwdg.de, but some scientists may try to access the resource via another path and fail. Let’s state the obvious: the current setup is not ideal.

Solution? For now the situation will remain as it is, but we are looking forward to the results of the MPG-AAI project which tries to establish an MPG-wide authentication and authorization infrastructure. A practicable solution for the MPG? I don’t know, but it has the potential to solve the Ovid login problem…

sfx link resolver

Linking to Elsevier’s ScienceDirect: advanced troubleshooting

5 Comments

Last week a user reported that he was asked for a login while trying to access a specific full text via a link provided by the MPG/SFX server. "A typical IP access problem", I hear you say, but the issue became more complicated soon. Further debugging indicated that

  1. the full text was available on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect platform and the user was able to access it by browsing to the article directly.
  2. the local librarian was correctly guided to the full text as she entered the same OpenURL and followed the steps taken by the user.
  3. the doi link created by the MPG/SFX link resolver was redirected to Elsevier’s Article Locator, but the intermediate page was displayed to the librarian only.
  4. the website selection screen enables users to "learn" which websites they use by setting a browser cookie:

Elsevier's Article Locator

… and that was exactly what happened to our user. Arriving to Elsevier’s Article Locator for the first time, he accidentally selected the "wrong" website and by doing so he removed the ScienceDirect platform from his preferences. Afterwards, he was not able to return to the intermediate page because he was automatically redirected to the article in his "preferred" Elsevier website.

Allowing users to set preferences is a commendable idea in general, but this implementation falls a bit short. While trying to access a full text, scientists do not read instructions very carefully, but attempt to click through as fast as possible. With setting cookies by default, they may unintentionally been pushed into a dead end.

After clarifying the problem, it was easy to provide a solution: The user could either open Elsevier’s preference page to update his website selections or delete the cookies stored by his browser.

But this issue was an important lesson for us SFX administrators as well. We need to avoid intermediate screens whenever possible, e.g. by configuring institutional preferences. Elsevier offers a cookie pusher for this task. The MPG/SFX link resolver already use it under certain conditions, but the implementation needs to be extended.

resources

Stuck in hibernation?

Is the vLib project team stuck in hibernation? No, not at all! Fact is that still most subscription contracts are up for renewal at the turn of the year. In addition, a lot of electronic products are newly released or ceased; some resources are transferred from one publisher to another while others just disappear without any notice. Behind the scenes we are busy with keeping all systems up & running – and this is a lot of work!

Any big news for 2009? Actually not, but some minor changes may be worth noticing:

  • The new Wiley contract includes all former Blackwell titles. Therefore, the number of Wiley e-journals available to all users in the MPG increased to more than 1.400 titles in total.
  • On the other hand side, it wasn’t possible to extend the trial of Oxford’s e-Books collections (Oxford Scholarship Online, OSO and Oxford Reference Online, ORO) any longer. At this point in time, the trial won’t be converted into a regular subscription due to high price expectations by the publisher.
  • INSPEC – the database for Physics, Electronics, and Computing – has been removed from the Ovid platform and is now available via the Web of Knowledge (WoK). Please notice that the WoK provides additional access to the INSPEC archive, launching the entire collection of Science Abstracts Journals dating from 1898 to 1968.
  • Check the vLib portal to find a continuously updated list of new resources.

Happy new year!

sfx link resolver

How many browser windows would you like?

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Over the last 6 months, we received some contradictory feedback regarding where the MPG/SFX server should open the options offered in the service menu (e.g. the link to the electronic full text). Currently, a click on a service name opens a new browser window to load the external location. All links use a named target window, thus whenever you choose another service, this should open in the same window.

From our users’ feedback we learned that this preference is not shared by everyone. Some users suggested to open a new window with each click, while others requested that SFX shouldn’t open new browser windows at all. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to follow the experts’ recommendation ("Place users in control") in this case, because the MPG/SFX menu does not contain "real" hypertext links. Instead, clicking a service name submits a web form which calls a script to generate the appropriate target URL according to the information available. Therefore, well known browser short cuts (like the context menu) are not available to the experienced user.

However, we want to match the user’s expectation and therefore consider to offer various options. An example is available on the MPG/SFX test instance (check the additional buttons new and “blank”).

Any thoughts or feedback is highly appreciated….

exLibris

Returning from Madrid

The International Group of Ex Libris Users (IGeLU) is an association of customers of one or several products offered by ExLibris Ltd. This group meets once year to share user experiences as well as to hear about upcoming product developments.

Between September 6-10, 2007 the 3rd IGeLU Conference has been hosted by the Spanish Council for Scientific Research in Madrid. Ex Libris took the chance to introduce its vision for the “next generation library system” which emphasis the decoupling of front-end interfaces from back-office services. While some effects of this strategic alignment became tangible over the course of the event (e.g. MetaLib will be re-implemented completely), many other fundamental questions remained open (e.g. who will be in control of the global data service layer?).

But the biggest surprise for me personally was the huge interest in the poster session on Tuesday afternoon:

View image on flickr (photo by lukask)

My colleague Silvia Munding and I presented the integration of e-book holdings into the service menu of the MPG/SFX link resolver and spent the complete time to discuss motivation and details of our setup with the audience. Wow! We even ran out of handouts in the middle of the session, but the electronic version of the poster is deposited on the edoc server. Thanks a lot for your interest and all the helpful suggestions.

You are interested in details about the IGeLU conference? You may start with checking out

  • our IGeLU 2008 trip report in the CoLab wiki (access restricted)
  • Ed Corrado’s comprehensive blog posting
  • more pictures tagged with “igelu” on flickr
sfx link resolver, tools

Citation Linker has grown up

Most of you have already been introduced to the Citation Linker which is a simple tool to access MPG/SFX services for a known reference by entering information manually. The number of monthly SFX requests per sources prove that the Citation Linker (“CITATION”) is very frequently used and therefore it was not really surprising to receive enhancement requests for this tool.

Your wish is our command! Please welcome two additional tabs on the citation linker form:
screen shot of tabs in citation linker

  • Chapter helps you entering data for items published in a book, see example.
  • Patent allows the location of issued patents and patent applications, see example.

Please note that only a limited number of services are available for the two object types, especially for patent literature. But maybe adding the tabs will lead to more requests related to these genres which would be a good reason to add additional services. Let’s see…

COinS, question and answer, sfx link resolver

Bringing MPG/SFX buttons to your reference list?

Two questions from my mail inbox today:

Can I add MPG/SFX buttons to my individual reference list? And if yes: Does this make any sense?

The answer to the first question is straight forward: Yes, you can link every reference to the corresponding MPG/SFX service menu. This requires you to create OpenURL links including all relevant bibliographic information and to add these links to the HTML code of your reference list. Our OpenURL generator (in German) may help you with this task.

But there is no definitive answer to the second question. Obviously, a link to the MPG/SFX resolver is especially helpful to staff of the Max Planck Society because the menu will offer relevant services for this specific target group. But users outside the MPG IP ranges are not assisted in such a comfortable way. The only help provided is a link to OCLC’s OpenURL Resolver Registry which can be used to redirect the request to a local resolver.

If you want to share your reference list with the public, you may consider adding COinS alternatively. COinS (“ContextObjects in Spans”) provide a measure to embed bibliographic information into the HTML code of a web page. Afterwards, the information can been used by your browser to display links to an OpenURL link resolver (such as MPG/SFX) or to download the record into a reference manager.

Further reading:

exLibris, materials

First thoughts on ExLibris' Open-Platform Strategy

The vLib portal as well as the MPG/SFX link resolver are built on software products provided by ExLibris Ltd. Some weeks ago, the company announced its new Open-Platform Strategy which is not too new according to their own words:

Ex Libris embraces openness. […] In recent years, Oren Beit-Arie, chief strategy officer at Ex Libris, affirmed product openness as a strategic direction and one of the company’s core values and set the open-platform program in motion to transform the vision into a concrete plan.

As ExLibris customer, we in principle welcome this distinct statement for openness, but the idea and its potential impact remained abstract on the first view. Particularly the new developer zone (called EL Commons) looks a bit pre-release and the strategical shift hasn’t raised much attention in the user community until now. Yesterday, I stumbled upon the podcast of a conversation between Richard Wallis and Oren Beit-Arie and found it extremely interesting. In this interview Oren made many points I strongly agree to. For example:

So, in other words, the open-platform strategy is about making sure that whenever we develop a product or a service, we develop it and deliver it in a way that is basically the opposite of a black box, that has lots of hooks and lots of entry and exit points that customers will be able to use, either to enter or to take out data or to plug in and interface and interoperate with other applications […]

Hurray, that is exactly what we are looking for! The strategy will hopefully lead ExLibris to discontinue the additional charging of product APIs and to move towards adapting more standards, e.g. SRU interfaces for Aleph/Digitool/Primo or RSS feeds for MetaLib IRD records and baskets. I feel slightly excited…

resources, sfx link resolver

Activating reference links on HighWire Press

Some time ago, we learned that the HighWire Press platform supports the activation of OpenURLs in the reference sections of selected journals. This allows us to link these references to the corresponding MPG/SFX service menus, e.g.:

screen shot of reference section in PNAS

Users from MPG will now find MPG/SFX links on following HighWire-hosted journal platforms:

Please note that OpenURL links are currently displayed for selected journal references only, but Oxford University Press already announced:

Future releases will include functionality to display OpenURL links for a wider range of references (for example, books) as well as additional metadata fields in OpenURL-encoded links (e.g. issue values).

… that sounds promising!