resources, vLib portal

information resource feeds – is this the data we want?

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vLib information resources are available in RSS 2.0 format, see http://vlib.mpg.de/vlib-rss-feed.html

What’s the benefit of this? A news stream to hook interest? A huge list of entry points to be filtered and maintained in a user’s own environment?

As items basically consist of a title, a description and a link, crucial information about the vLib resource represented by an RSS 2.0 item may fail to be conveyed.

This may be a mere mapping issue as discussed at https://devtools.mpdl.mpg.de/projects/vlib/wiki/RSS (i.e. map more fields to RSS 2.0 item description) – where we are not taking into account additional atom elements yet (to contain, for example, an html-formatted description), or atom format to contain more detailed data about a resource.

Or we might even consider pointing subscribers to our own interface to a resource rather than to the resource’s original web interface.

The vLib resource interface URL is actually present within items as guid, and, in fact, it is meant to be a permalink – however, certain feed readers appear to prefer a permalink in guid to the URL in item link, that’s why guid isPermaLink is presently set to false.

localization, materials

vLib-Workshop zur XXXII. Bibliothekstagung der MPG

3 Comments

In den letzten Jahren hat sich der Mai als Traditionsmonat für die MPG-Bibliothekstagung durchgesetzt. An der 32. Ausgabe hat sich das vLib Projekt mit einem Workshop zum Thema "vLib Dienste lokal nutzen" beteiligt:

Auf slideshare ansehen

Mein Fazit: Der Vortrag war auch für mich ein Experiment, weil ich die beschriebenen Möglichkeiten im Rahmen des Workshops "live" auf einer Beispielsseite umgesetzt habe. Dabei wollte ich vermitteln, dass sich viele Funktionalitäten (z.B. das Angebot von Suchboxen oder die dynamische Einbindung von Ressource-Listen) mit wenig Aufwand lokal realisieren lassen. Die Rückmeldungen zeigen allerdings, dass mir dies nur teilweise gelungen ist. Ich habe zuviel Inhalt in 75 Minuten gepackt, die Beispiele zu schnell entwickelt und einige ZuschauerInnen daher mit leichtem Schwindelgefühl zurückgelassen (lesson learned!). Trotzdem scheinen einige KollegInnen in Bastellaune geraten zu sein – und ich freue mich schon auf Ergebnisse, Anforderungen und neue Ideen.

Update: Mittlerweile steht die Präsentation auch auf dem eDoc-Server zur Verfügung.

COinS, question and answer

EndNote, Bibliographies, OpenURLs and COinS

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Another challenging question from a fellow librarian in the Max Planck Society:

How can I add OpenURL links to a reference list created with EndNote?

That is a tough one! Fact is that EndNote itself is OpenURL enabled, meaning the software can be configured to use a specific link resolver for full text linking and more (see the instructions provided by the IVS-BM for details). But it looks like this feature is not available while generating a bibliography with EndNote. Or at least, I haven’t discovered a trick to export references plus OpenURLs with any built-in means.

However, it is possible to customize existing Output Styles, e.g. by adding a COinS to each entry of a reference list created with this style. I tried it, but found the result sub-optimal (see examples below). The major problem is that EndNote’s Output Style Manager does not support URL-encoding of values and that would be required to generate valid COinS. The OpenURL Referrer extension seems to be gentle enough to accept them nevertheless, but Zotero rejects the import. What a bummer!

 

Example Bibliography (with COinS*)

Adam, G., Anke, H., Boland, W., & al., e. (2000). Roempp encyclopedia natural products. Stuttgart: Thieme.  

Adam, G., Schmidt, J., & Schneider, B. (1999). Brassinosteroids. Progress in the Chemistry of Organic Natural Products, 78, 1-46.  

Adam, G., & Schneider, B. (1999). Uptake, transport and metabolism. In A. Sakurai, T. Yokota & S. D. Clouse (Eds.), Brassinosteroids: Steroidal Plant Hormones (pp. 113-136). Tokyo: Springer.  

* You don’t see a COinS? Check the corresponding web page for additional information.

sfx link resolver

MPG/SFX got deep indexed by Google

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End of 2008 we noticed that the Googlebot started to deep crawl the MPG/SFX link resolver by following distinct OpenURLs. This finding was surprising because we haven’t expected any free available website to promote deep links to dynamic pages created by the MPG/SFX server. There are some indicators that the assumption could have been wrong, e.g. Yahoo’s Site Explorer meanwhile counts 5,365 Inlinks to "sfx.mpg.de" in total. This deserves some additional checking!

In addition, I just learned from a post on the Google webmaster blog, that the web form offered by the MPG/SFX Citation Linker could have been used to crawl the server as well. But this is not very obvious because I’m pretty sure that Google doesn’t rate MPG/SFX as a "high-quality site".

The cause remained undetermined; however, the number of requests from Googlebot had significant impact on the statistics created for the SFX service. Therefore, we refined the robots.txt last December to disallow indexing of the relevant directories and started to forget about it… until today. Today, we learned from a feedback that any Internet user may accidentally stumble about an empty MPG/SFX menu and doesn’t feel well served – which is totally understandable. Unfortunately, it looks like Google’s index still includes a high amount of links to "sfx.mpg.de":
Google search result

Hm, it looks like modifying the robots.txt is not a very straightforward way to remove content from Google. Meanwhile, we used the URL removal request tool offered by Google Webmaster Tools. Let’s see if this will reduce the number of superfluous requests.

resources, sfx link resolver

One week, two new OpenURL sources

Sometimes, it’s really worth asking content providers for OpenURL support – even it may take some time and effort to identify the appropriate contact person. This week was pay-off time and we activated links to the MPG/SFX link resolver on two additional information platforms:

  • Credo Reference has been licensed recently to provide MPG staff with full text access to 150 reference books. OpenURL links to the MPG/SFX server are offered for the references in selected articles, see example.
  • BioOne launched a new platform some weeks ago and mentioned "Open URL compliance" in the the corresponding announcement. The revised user interface provides OpenURL links for all literature cited (see example), but the implementation requires some improvements – in particular for books and book items.

Time to start the weekend!

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!

resources, vLib portal

Integration of electronic resources

On the one hand, there’s a rich abundance of electronic resources, on the other hand, it requires some effort to maintain and organize them.

An integrated platform may be a solution, but at least to some degree we’ll always be dealing with multiple interfaces and decentralized data.

From a user’s point of view, it may be desirable to integrate the various interfaces like links to web platforms, search engines, lookup tools, etc., with his or her own browser environment. Maybe this is actually a good place to combine everything, because this is where other useful tools and interfaces provided by third parties are to be found, see

e-resources in browser environment

If a browser search engine does not deliver results as desired, access to a more specific search interface is probably the best solution. By using vLib resource feeds, it is possible to organize these links in a feed reader or as bookmarks. Above I’m using Wizz RSS, a Firefox add-on feed reader.

Combining resources tends to blur the precision of a search, but on the other hand covers a wider range of content. Hence it may be useful to organize resources (with search interfaces) in sets, such as

vLib resource set

or use a deep link to point users to the interface which may best serve their purpose, examples: a list of resources, vs. a specific search triggered right away.

Documentation about deep linking may be found here.