OpenURL revisited

Our Systems Librarian has been working away at integrating repository content into our OpenURL coverage database, and we’re at a stage where it looks to be working pretty well. This means that whenever someone finds an article the repository holds in a resource which supports OpenURL linkage (e.g. Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, EBSCO etc.), they will be able to find their way to the full text item in City Research Online in just a couple of clicks.

For example, here’s a search in Google Scholar for a paper in City Research Online. Next to the citation information for the first hit (which is for the article itself), and depending on whether you have access to a link resolver, you should see a link. At City, it looks like this (click on the image to see an enlarged version):

Google Scholar screenshot

Hitting that link here at City runs a query against our Web Bridge resource coverage, which confirms that the repository holds the paper, and allows you to click through to the paper itself. I would be interested to know if this works for people at other institutions with OpenURL services- please leave a comment!

To maintain the repository’s coverage of repository resources, we’re going to do a monthly coverage upload of newly added material. There are also a few bugs to iron out, and we also need to decide if we should be trying to extend coverage to other item types (primarily book chapters and conference papers), since at the moment we’ve only uploaded journal article details.

This is a great development, and goes some way to properly integrating repository material into a variety of commonly used resource discovery tools. We expect to see a lot of hits from Web Bridge in Google Analytics, and it will be interesting to see exactly how many we receive via this channel. Finally, when playing around with Google Scholar to write this post, it looks like Scholar is (finally) indexing a good proportion of our material, which should also help get our material found!

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Filed under: City Research Online, Systems, discovery, Google, Google Scholar, OpenURL

OpenURL and City Research Online

We’ve been grappling with OpenURL here at City, partly as a result of work being done at LSE (see comments in addition to the main post which give useful context), where I used to manage the repository. A little healthy rivalry never hurt anyone!

We wanted to make sure that repository users are able to reach the published versions of research as quickly as is possible, even though we’re currently associating full text with (nearly- see below) every record. To this end, we include DOIs in every record that has one, meaning that people can click through to the published article.

Where an OpenURL resolver comes in handy is by extending the concept of discovery-by-DOI above to query whether your home institution holds the article in question, then if it does to send you directly to the published version of that article. We’ve now configured this so it works for any UK institution. In other words, you can run an OpenURL query via an ePrint record, and it will check against any OpenURL-enabled holdings at UKHE institutions.

By way of example, if you go to this record, hit the tools button at the top of the record, and hit the “Find a copy” button, you will be able to find out if your institution has access to the journal Language Learning and Development for the year in question (in this case 2010). If it does, you will be able to click through and (after logging in) see the published version of this paper.

Why, you might ask, does this matter if all of City Research Online’s records have full text associated with them? There are a few reasons why it might be a useful feature, I think. First, you might wish to compare the open access version of a paper with the published version. Second, you may come across a record which is still under a publisher’s embargo period and is hence not available from the repository, but you still wish to access it. Third, it may be the case in future that we open up the repository to non-full text citations, in which case discovery of items away from the repository (via DOI or OpenURL) becomes much more important.

Finally, a note on getting repository material into our OpenURL holdings. If we were to do this, it would mean that we would enable click-throughs from citations databases (e.g. Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science etc.) using “Find this article” (or similar) buttons, making material in the repository more discoverable. To do this, we need to track repository holdings, something that our OpenURL tracker can’t currently do. However we have one or two leads on this, so watch this space…

Filed under: Systems, discovery, OpenURL, system architecture