Academic institutions often manage access to their electronic resources by creating institution-specific URLs. For example, one particular electronic library database within the Open University generates links like this to be saved to bookmarking tools:
http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&
db=a9h&AN=11830244&site=ehost-live&scope=site
This link ties us into one specific (OU) library in two ways:
- it specifies a proxy server tied to the OU which will require authentication prior to resolving the variables within the link
- the data identifying the particular resource is an accession number relating to the OU
For social scholarly bookmarking, we ideally want to find ways of bookmarking that are meaningful for users regardless of their institution ..
I've started to use the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for scholarly materials I'm bookmarking in delicious. Basically a DOI points to an underlying object rather than any of its attributes. So the current URL of an article can be viewed as an attribute as it may be subject to change, for example if the publishing house is taken over. But the DOI is permanent so it will not change. Resolver systems can take a DOI and return a current URL. This has huge benefits for managing scholarly resources.
Article on use of DOIs for library services: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may06/apps/05apps.html
Of course, delicious doesn't have a specific field for storing the doi, so at the moment I'm saving it as a tag containing the prefix "doi:" followed by the key
Bookmark: academic paper on elearning spaces
Originally uploaded by carol shergold
It should then be possible to manually plug the DOI into a tool like Google Scholar search for any individual to see where they had access. It would be feasible to write a bookmarklet that scanned delicious looking for DOIs and adding a link for objects that were available in a given individual's home instititution.
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