Tag Archives: Peter Binkley

COinS anyone?

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I’ve been following the development of a new technology called COinS with a lot of interest. Lorcan Dempsey wrote about it last week on his blog and used that post to announce the availability of COinS functionality in Open WorldCat. Great news! If you use the Firefox web browser and have installed the OpenURL Referrer extension, you should see your local OpenURL site’s logo or text appear next to citation information in this post, thanks to COinS. This is highly useful stuff. To go even further, if you use WordPress as your blogging software, you can use a COinS plugin for WordPress developed by Peter Binkley that helps to create the COinS information. Or create your COinS information using a freely available COinS generator.

Google Scholar and OpenURL

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Google Scholar recently began what it describes as a “small pilot project” with a number of libraries, to link Google Scholar search results through their OpenURL services. See Google Scholar Preferences for a complete list of current libraries participating in the project.

It took me only a few minutes to achieve much the same thing for my institution, thanks to the work of Peter Binkley at the University of Alberta and the folks at Openly Informatics. Students and faculty at Taylor who use the Firefox web browser (and in my opinion, more of them should be using Firefox) can add in an extension that will make Google Scholar results link directly through the “Get It! @ Taylor” OpenURL service that I set up.

Firefox extension for Google Scholar

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Some really cool news from the oss4lib discussion list today. Openly Informatics, perhaps best known as the purveyors of the 1CATE OpenURL link resolver, announced the availability of a significant enhancement to Peter Binkley’s Google Scholar Firefox extension. Their more functional version is available for download here. I’ve already developed a Taylor-specific version of this extension and will shortly publicize it on my library’s blog, Z-Blog. And then there was a real sense of convergence when a student came to me late this afternoon, asking me to help him with Google Scholar and finding full text that we might have available in library databases. He had been using Google Scholar since its beta release late last year, but was constantly frustrated by the discovery that many of the articles he was looking for weren’t available to him. You can imagine how pleased and excited he was when I showed him what I had just been working on earlier today!