I’ve seen a few announcement on various Mendeley related twitter streams that Mendeley now works with your local library via OpenURL. I didn’t know what that meant though so it was no big deal. After five minutes’ play it turns out it could be a much bigger deal than I thought.
What Mendeley is (sometimes) good at is finding related papers to ones that are in your collections. If someone else is working on similar topics, it’s very good. If you’re the only one in your field on Mendeley then maybe less so. When you find a related paper, you then open a new tab, search through your own library’s catalogue, etc… What Mendeley’s announcement means in English is that you can very easily make a Look for this at Leicester (or your own home library) button. I have two, and I’ll explain why below.
To add the button you need to find the base URL of your library. In the UK this is done by going to openurl.ac.uk. If your library isn’t on that list, you’re probably out of luck. Other countries might have other OpenURL servers, I don’t know. Going to Leicester through this drops you at http://resolver1.sirsi.co.uk/? To add the first button clicked on my account, chose account details from the dropdown menu, clicked on sharing/importing from the row of tabs and then to the section Edit Library Access Links, where I clicked on the button Add library manually. I got this form:
I trimmed the ? off and then labelled the library Leicester and the URL as http://resolver1.sirsi.co.uk/
It works. Except I tend to access the site off campus, so any links to journals from Leicester won’t work for me. The ATHENS instructions on the library’s website are out-of-date, so you need to access via the proxy. The address for the proxy catalogue is http://resolver1.sirsi.co.uk.ezproxy.lib.le.ac.uk/ for Leicester. If you’re not at Leicester the address for your own library this will be different and without access I have no idea what it will be.
I labelled this button Leicester Ex for external and this works like accessing the proxy catalogue. If you click on it from Mendeley, a page will ask you to sign in to the proxy and then it will forward a relevant page in the library catalogue. If you’re already signed into the proxy you don’t even see that.
Update: 10:45: Thanks to John McGowan, in the comments below there’s a much better solution. Use http://ezproxy.lib.le.ac.uk/login?url=http://openurl.ac.uk/ukfed:le.ac.uk as the URL. It will work anywhere — if you’re at Leicester.
It’s not a huge change, but it’s a nice little add-on that makes working with Mendeley easier, and doesn’t require special access to anything or complex APIs.
Thanks for blogging this — a couple of points that may be of interest:
If you have any problems finding the address for your own institutions OpenURL resolver, in the UK you can use a handy service called the ‘OpenURL router’ — instead of entering your local institutions ‘base URL’ you enter http://openurl.ac.uk — this is generally successful where you are working ‘on campus’ (technically using an IP that falls into your institutions IP range)
Secondly just another service you might be interested in that uses OpenURL to achieve the same thing as Mendeley does here is the LibX toolbar (available for IE and Firefox) http://www.libx.org/. This browser plugin can be configured with the details of the OpenURL resolver you wish to use and then will offer links to full text when information (such as an ISSN) appears in any page you are viewing in the browser. It has a load of other functionality as well, and also can be configured with the details of your ‘proxy server’ so that links to full text can be routed via your proxy server when you are working off campus.
Hi — Good post,
I’m the Systems librarian at Leicester and there are a couple of changes you need to make as you are close but not quite right!
You only need one link to give you on and off campus access:
Ignore the openurl.ac.uk option in Mendeley and create your own using the link below —
http://ezproxy.lib.le.ac.uk/login?url=http://openurl.ac.uk/ukfed:le.ac.uk
It will work on and off campus so you don’t need to have two links — the url’s you have used in your post shouldn’t really be used:
http://resolver1.sirsi.co.uk/ — isn’t persistent as we may change this service.
http://resolver1.sirsi.co.uk.ezproxy.lib.le.ac.uk/ — this isn’t the proxy catalogue, its part of a rewritten url cut and pasted from the address bar and won’t be reliable or persistent.
This is a link to the Library’s version of LibX:
http://www.le.ac.uk/li/digital/leicesterlibx.html
cheers
Thanks for the comments. LibX looks better and better, as I see it works with CiteULike.
I’m glad you like LibX — LibX 2.0 is currently in development along with a mobile version.
Another interesting OpenURL related plugin can be found here:
http://openly.oclc.org/openurlref/
This is pretty cool as it lets you link back to Leicester Library holdings from all over the place use the same link as above for the resolver baseurl and if you want the little e-link button its here:
http://www.le.ac.uk/li/images/e-Link.gif