Tuesday, October 13, 2009

NUS Digital Library Bookmarklets

The NUS Digital Library has a very comprehensive list of e-resources which includes many publishers like ACM, Springer, IEEE, etc. It's great but it does not really help since most of the time, we find papers through Google search results. Here's (a possible) workflow:
  1. Search keywords in Google
  2. Find an exact match that goes to the paper page in ACM, Springer, IEEE, etc.
  3. Go to the NUS Digital Library page, find and login to the publisher site.
  4. Search the publisher site for the paper you've previously found.
  5. Click on the download link.
The problem that necessitates the above is the page found by Google is the normal unauthenticated page (not logged in). And we cant use the side bar of the site to log in because that's not how the e-resources work in NUS (which authenticates via proxy).

One solution to this problem is to go directly from the normal page to the proxy page. We can use bookmarklets to achieve this. Changing the domain name of the URL works most of the time but may not work for sites that have different URLs when you're authenticated. For this, we have to find the correct URL for that site.

Here are some bookmarklets that I have used with success:

IEEE
javascript:window.location=window.location.protocol+
'//ieeexplore.ieee.org.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/xpls/abs_all.jsp'+
window.location.search+window.location.hash;


Springer
javascript:window.location=window.location.protocol+
'//springerlink.metapress.com.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg'+
window.location.pathname+window.location.search+
window.location.hash;


All others (including ACM Digital Library)
javascript:window.location=window.location.protocol+
'//'+window.location.hostname+'.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg'+
window.location.pathname+window.location.search+
window.location.hash;


So now, when you reach a page from Google. You just need to click on the bookmarklet to get to the paper download page.

Note: The bookmarklets above must be one single line. There should not be any whitespaces.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Jess

    Interesting post. You do know that NUS Libraries has the Proxy bookmarklet at http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/lion/d/proxybkmrklet_google.html

    http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/lion/sg/ss/ec/Use%20of%20Proxy%20Bookmarklet%20with%20Google%20Scholar.doc

    It's not fool-proof as you point out of course.

    Additional tips for you since you are a Phd student.

    Search databases using OpenSearch Plugins via NUS Libraries' subscriptions (beta)

    http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/lion/p/srchplugin/searchplugin.htm

    LibX toolbar (not officially supported)

    http://libx.org/editions/download.php?edition=039CA547

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Aaron :)

    I'm from the School of Computing so unfortunately, most of the search plugins are not very useful for me. The three I posted above are actually most useful because the papers I find can be typically found on ACM, IEEE, or SpringerLink. I use Google as a starting point because sometimes it gives me a direct link to the document (for example, from the author's pubpage).

    ReplyDelete