Charlene Barina November 20th, 2006
As a graduate student, I’ve come to appreciate more the varieties of ways to leverage things like journal article access and what we have here at UW. However, sometimes it’s a question of guess and find out, too.
I use connotea, a Nature-based cross between social bookmarking and endnote, that allows me to bookmark articles and tag them with topics and what-not (see my listings for some real-life examples). The developers of connotea are using working on plugins to auto-import citation information, and user contributions help a lot in expanding their options (right now, it’ll auto-recognized from PubMed, but not from, say, Jstor or Taylor and Francis).
The kicker though is that there is an option for entering a OpenURL resolver for your institution so that it’ll generate OpenURL links for each item you add to your list. This has proven pretty useful for browsing journals or jumping to my pdfs, but it was information that wasn’t readily accessible. I think my email request for the server literally was forwarded on to the Associate Dean of Libraries for the libraries on-campus - which definitely made me feel spiffy on one level - like getting a response from the President of the University concerning directions to his office.
Similarly, while playing around with modifying existing libx code for UW catalogs, I ended up getting an email from the head of information systems for UW libraries - also fairly neat. I got libx to work with UW and Seattle Public Libraries’ catalog (I just randomly plugged in OPAC options for them), but javascript did me in and I haven’t worked on it since.
I’m still vague on what OpenURL and OPACs are, really, but using some IT finagling, where you rarely knowwhat the heck you’re doing anyway worked well enough 
I guess my main question is there a reason that the library infrastructure isn’t accessible through faq/site searching? Or is this something that varies from library to library? With random library and info widgets floating around out there, are libraries even interested in open-sourced or enduser-built access products?
Tags: Resources, Web 2.0
